1 6 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



which it gave — good, in many respects — was a training in 

 memory, in expression and in accuracy of apprehending lan- 

 guage, one's own or another's, rather than in scientific method 

 as we understand it today. 



There is on the facade of the main hall of a university which 

 has done much for education in many lines, a representation of 

 Philosophy in a dominant central position — old fashioned meta- 

 physical philosophy — with the different sciences laying tribute 

 at her feet. I suspect that this is not an unfair characterization 

 of the views as to the place of science in education which pre- 

 vailed among most college faculties a generation or two ago. 



Now let me say right here that I do not for a moment overlook 

 the advantages of the old system. It taught the boys to use books 

 and find things out from books, and to expect to do hard work for 

 that purpose instead of to have somebody else make it easy. This 

 was a great merit, and the boys trained under the old system 

 showed this merit. But college faculties were often blind to the 

 particular kind of book learning and to the general kind of book 

 learning that was most important for human progress and which 

 was of most concern to the living world outside. 



For at the time when the Academy was founded, and in the 

 time since, chemistry and physics and geology and biology were 

 becoming not only matters of importance to the experts in their 

 several callings, as I have indicated, but matters of real and 

 dominant interest to intelligent men who were not experts, but 

 who cared for knowledge and who cared for current history. 

 A large section of the world, an increasingly large section of 

 the world, cared more for books that explained the tendencies 

 of the present than for those that embodied the ideals of the past. 

 Perhaps this movement may have gone too far and may have 

 caused people to care too little for the ideals of the past, to 

 overvalue scientific reading as compared with historical or 

 literary reading. I shall not try to discuss whether it did or not. 

 At any rate, a curriculum which was exclusively occupied with 

 classics and philosophy did not fully meet the demands of grown 



