22^ [Assembly 



defined to be the "Hand-maid of the Arts," and as such is most 

 assuredly a " maid of honor," for certainly there is no higher vo- 

 cation than that of ministering to the wants of the arts, on which 

 the comforts and refinements of civilized life depend, and without 

 which civilization itself could have no existence. Science may 

 claim still more — it may be considered as the very soul of the 

 arts, giving to them life and progressive power, creating new 

 means of human advancement, multiplying arts, and re-acting 

 again upon the mind of the discoverer or inventor, endowing him 

 with still higher powers of discernment and application. The 

 time has long since passed when the dignity of a science was reck- 

 oned by its uselessness and it inapplicability to the so-called vul- 

 gar uses of life. 



No longer is learning to be banished from the workshop and 

 shut up in cloistered cells or in colleges, there to be kept beyond 

 the reach of the workingmen of our land. No longer is science 

 to be kept confined in her drowsy halls, or to be limited to the 

 easy chair of a professor, and to be exhibited only to astonish a 

 stupid and ignorant people ; but on the contrary, she now walks 

 abroad with her working dress on, and is found in the workshops 

 of our artizans, in the field v.ith the husbandman and in the 

 depths of our mines, giving life to the arts and inspiring intelli- 

 gence and conscious power among a sensible, practical, and by no 

 means uncultivated class of our fellow citizens. The college is now 

 outstripped by the common high school and academy in the walks 

 of science, which are vainly denounced as not the ways of liberal 

 education. One of our Phi-Beta- Kappa orators said, a few years 

 since, " It is not expected of a scholar that he should hang with 

 trembling anxiety over the vibrations of a balance." That gen- 

 tleman, who at that time expressed the views entertained by one 

 of our oldest seminaries of learning, has, doubtless, long since 

 changed his views, and is willing to allow that accuracy is one of 

 the highest qualities of a scholar. 



It is too late for antiquated scholars to denounce the cultivation 

 of science, or to expatiate on the superiority of a little knowl- 

 edge of Latin and Greek, for the world now bears witness to the 

 higher achievements of modern science ; and instead of delving 



