AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 99 



Jin American University. 



We have now looked into the little nook of our exhibition, 

 throwing a more or less distinct light upon the products, trying 

 to show the outlines of the schools, academies and colleges, and 

 the faint shadows of the universities, using as many gas burners 

 as our supply would permit, in considering the institutions for 

 improvement of mechanics and the mechanic arts, and for progress 

 in science, in commerce and in the arts. It is not an exhibition 

 of " all institutions," so we will be pardoned that so few are 

 represented, and that we have taken them rather as they came to 

 us than as if we had sought them and asked them to send their 

 products for exhibition. That we have taken those nearest home, 

 rather than sought far and wide for more appropriate materials; 

 that we have stuck upon the minor pegs our notice of Europe 

 as it was and is, and a leaf from the volume of its industrial and 

 mechanical development, and from the history of our own progress 

 in the arts and sciences. In a side nook is a favorite collection of 

 models and drawings, representing in fragments and in coarse 

 outline, a much needed institution still unreared, to be based upon 

 the schools, colleges and the mechanics' institutes, to be built by 

 the exertions of mechanics, of the merchants and the scholars, an 

 institution for the more effective promotion of knowledge among 

 its members, for the advancement of the branches of knowledge 

 themselves, in the most comprehensive sense of the words, a uni- 

 versity of the arts and sciences. 



If language was taught upon the natural philosophic principles 

 so ably and plainly laid down by Professor Roemer, there would 

 be no diflSlculty in recognizing it as a science, and no violence 

 would be done in thus classing it. " We should proceed from 

 facts to principles, and then from principles down to consequences; 

 we should begin with analysis and end with synthesis." Is not 

 this science ? The sentence is from Professor Roemer's Essay on 

 the Study of Languages. 



Origin of Universities. 



The universities of the old world, if they did not spring chiefly 

 from the wants of the professions, at least in their systematic 

 organization had direct reference to the technical preparation for 



