338 
NATURE 
[ FEBRUARY 7, 1907 
of including details which cannot possibly be 
thoroughly understood by the ordinary lay reader. 
For example, a certain amount of description of micro- 
scopic structure is included, which is either too much 
or too little. It would probably have been better 
omitted entirely. Again, a short list of muscles, such 
as is given on p. 14, cannot be of any value whatever 
to the reader for whom the book is intended. Most 
of the’illustrations are good, but some of them— 
notably Fig. 2—are far from clear. 
The compilation has much to commend it, and at 
the same time has many of the defects which appear 
to be inseparable from books of its kind. 
HIGHER EDUCATION IN GERMANY. 
The German Universities and University Study. By 
Friedrich Paulsen. Authorised translation by Frank 
Thilly and William Elwang. Pp. xvi+45r. 
(London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1906.) Price 
15s. net. 
HIS excellent translation of Prof. Paulsen’s 
celebrated book on the German universities will 
be welcomed by many readers interested in the ques- 
tion of university education who have not the time 
or opportunity to read it in. the original; the book is 
not merely an account of German universities, but 
treats the general subject of higher education in its 
relation to the advancement of knowledge and to the 
life of the community on a broad and philosophic 
basis. 
The peculiar value which seems to us to attach to 
this work is due to this very breadth of view; the 
author is concerned, not with pressing the importance 
of some particular aspect of university life or of the 
claims of a particular branch of learning, an attitude 
which reduces so much of the writing on English 
education to mere sectional pamphleteering, but with 
the presentation of the historical development of uni- 
versity life, and especially with the function of the 
university under modern conditions, and with the 
problems which these conditions bring in their train. 
It is probably true that it is easier to be dispassionate 
when one is contented, and Prof. Paulsen is, on the 
whole, contented with the German universities and 
what they have done and are doing for the culture 
of the German people; but his contentment goes 
deeper; he is satisfied that the universities in Germany 
owe their hold over the intellectual life of the people 
to their unreserved acceptation of the scientific spirit, 
that is to say, the spirit of inquiry and free investi- 
gation into all the departments of learning. The 
university is defended and vindicated by the author 
primarily as an institution for research and the 
advancement of knowledge, and secondarily as a 
place of education; secondarily, not from the mis- 
taken notion that education is considered less 
important than the expansion of the limits of know- 
ledge, for we may remember that the only way of 
entering the learned professions, including school- 
mastering and the Civil Service, in Germany is 
NO. 1945, VOL. 75] 
through the university, but because the most 
important part of a university education is considered 
to be the actual contact with the fountains of know- 
ledge and the acquisition of a capacity to grapple 
with original sources and to form an independent 
opinion. The system undoubtedly has its dangers, 
especially the danger of over-specialisation and the 
fault of encouraging students to undertake scientific 
investigation who would be more fittingly employed 
in practical affairs; but the author considers that the 
universities have gained and retained their influence 
by standing in the van of new ideas as the home for 
investigation, instead of handing on traditional learn- 
ing, tardily and painfully modified from without by 
the changes of the times. 
It is interesting to note the parting of the ways 
between the French and German universities at the 
beginning of the nineteenth century; the Napoleonic 
era converted the French universities into technical 
schools for the professions, and banished the pursuit 
of learning to the academies, while at that very time 
Humboldt founded the modern University of Berlin in 
direct opposition as an institution of free learning and 
broad education, and to that ideal all the German 
universities conformed. 
There can hardly be any doubt as to which ideal 
has proved most fruitful, but the plan is apparently 
now advocated in some quarters in Germany of 
attempting to combine the technical schools in a 
closer alliance with the universities, and Prof. Paulsen 
has sufficient faith in the innate Teutonic love of 
learning to believe that science would not thereby 
be strangled in the grasp of a short-sighted utili- 
tarianism. This, of course, especially applies to the 
natural sciences; but in all the faculties there have 
grown up, side by side with the universities, technical 
academies of art, military science, commerce, juris- 
prudence, and the like, which train an increasing 
number of students. 
*“All public institutions of learning,’ remarks 
Prof. Paulsen, ‘‘ are called into existence by social 
needs,’’ and it is interesting to follow the historical 
evolution of the university from this point of 
view as it is skilfully delineated by the author. 
The medizval universities seem really to have 
satisfied our modern ideals to an extent which is 
perhaps not commonly suspected, and will probably 
never be re-attained; they were, in the first place, 
cosmopolitan, and not under the restrictions of a 
particular country or Government, and they were the 
true repositories of the learning of their times. With 
the coming of the Renaissance, and later of the 
Reformation, a change of the greatest importance 
occurred; from being cosmopolitan they became 
strictly territorial, from being free they became the 
instrumenta dominationis of the particular Govern- 
ment under which they happened to be. 
In consequence, the faculty of law was chiefly 
fostered to the detriment of all others, and towards 
the end of the seventeenth century in Germany uni- 
versity life was at a very low ebb. With the found- 
ations of Halle and Gottingen in the eighteenth 
’ 
