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DECEMBER 31, 1903] 
any kind of machinery that ever yet was invented. There 
is too much of the ludicrousness of Teufelsdréch’s iron 
king about all schemes of examination that ever I have 
known, and there is too much of the draper’s assistant 
style of work about your boards and committees. If you 
have any really important piece of work to do, give it to 
some one man to do, and ask people to discuss it at a public 
meeting ; but this committee kind of pretence of work is 
getting to be ridiculous. You are certainly wasting the 
time of the few good men and giving easy consciences to 
all the other men who attend these boards. 
I hold a brief for the average man usually said to be 
stupid, and yet I have been speaking of scholars, the rulers 
of the university, the men to whom younger men look up 
with worship. This is because there can be no real teach- 
ing unless some of these higher men are really great 
students themselves. Never did men have as good a 
chance of education for themselves as the fellows of the 
rich Oxford colleges; never had men such a chance of 
merely marking time and pretending to educate themselves. 
About seventy years ago teaching began to become the 
very valuable monopoly of the college tutors. This could 
hurt, but could not destroy, the effect of college life in 
producing liberal culture. The college don ceased to be a 
student, he tried to teach many different subjects much in the 
style of the fourth form master in schools; he prepared men 
for Responsions, which is really a sort of belated matricula- 
tion examination ; clever men may still pay him fees, but for 
them there is only harm in attending his classes. Hence 
it is that for thirty years you have been returning to the 
ancient practice, and the number of university professors, 
of lecture halls and laboratories is slowly growing. Surely 
this is the direction of true reform. Is it not possible to 
get each rich college to establish two or three great schools 
in which only two or three subjects may be studied by 
men through their own research, commanded by men of 
the highest talent and initiative, who are free to teach as 
they please and to examine as they please? But what 
chance is there of this or any reform? We have reached 
a time when the good men are discouraged and the bad men 
are triumphant. The powers of Arimanes set themselves 
against the powers of Oromasdes, disputing reform, and 
there have been many signs during the last fifteen years 
that the powers of darkness, those opposed to science, have 
organised themselves more scientifically than the powers 
of light. They have determined that in the future no change 
shall be made in the character of Oxford studies. They 
do their best to make past reforms operative only for evil. 
As for the reformers, their conception of a university is of 
one in which there are so many literary and scientific sub- 
jects taught that every student can obtain, through the 
study of few or many of them, the most perfect training of 
which his mind is capable. Some of us have the belief that 
the average mind is capable, by training, of becoming 
immeasurably richer than even a few exceptionally great 
minds have ever been. 
By the study of a subject I mean not merely listening to 
lectures, not merely using books, not merely a student’s 
own research, or discussion with other men whose courses 
of study may be the same or not the same, but all this and 
much more, the most important after research being the 
worshipful study of great men whom the student is 
privileged to meet and possibly to work with. I mean 
also that a youth ought to have had a previous training 
fitting him for university study. There are few boys who 
might not be well trained at the age of fifteen; in my 
opinion ninety per cent. of Oxford undergraduates are at 
present quite unfit for any kind of university study. 
I now come to a question in which I stand alone, and I 
‘beg your patience. My best friends seem unable to criticise 
me, for they find it impossible to get to my point of view. 
What ought to be the nature of the matriculation examin- 
ation? I wish I had half an hour in which to try to con- 
1 Throughout this address my hands have been tied so that I may not 
make particular references. But suppose I were to provide money for the 
endowment of a valuable professorship of some scientific subject, do we not 
know what the Oxford authorities would do with it? They would appoint 
as professor a man who had never done any scientific work, who can never 
be expected to do any scientific work, who never wants to do any scientific 
work, and whose highest ambition will be to'act zealously as the bursar of 
his college ! 
NO. 1783, VOL. 69] 
NATURE 
213 
vince you that its sole object is to test whether a student 
is likely to benefit by any of the university courses of study. 
Surely this was the medizval idea; the one compulsory 
subject was Latin, because all the literature known to 
students and teachers was in Latin; all lectures were de- 
liyered in Latin; all teaching was’in Latin. Consequently, 
in some Oxford colleges a man was fined if he spoke in 
any other tongue. Surely it was a good time when all 
learned men in the world spoke the same language. Then 
came the time when there was still no English literature, 
and not only was the best literature in Greek, but Greek 
was the only approach to natural knowledge, so Greek 
also was compulsory, and so it has remained to this day— 
to this day, when English literature is of greater worth 
than any ancient or, indeed, any other modern literature, 
when all teaching, all lectures are given in English, and 
when our English knowledge of natural science is not only 
infinitely greater than anything possessed by the ancients, 
but it enables us to say that the ancients were hopelessly 
wrong, when nobody except the official university orator 
or some traveller ignorant of the language of a foreign 
country speaks Latin, and speaks rather the Latin of 
Stratford-atte-Bow than the Latin of Rome! Three 
hundred years ago the rule was reasonable and necessary, 
but fo insist on its observance now, when it is stupid and 
unneévessary, seems to me quite unscientific.* 
I would therefore make a knowledge of Latin or of Greek 
compulsory only on students of certain subjects, and the 
professor ought to impose the condition, not the university. 
Again, students of certain other subjects ought to be sup- 
posed to know one or more modern foreign languages, 
and, indeed, it seems to me that the professor in each 
subject has a right to insist, if he pleases, on his students 
having certain special knowledge before they enter on the 
study with him. I would give him this right because I 
want him to have perfect freedom. But to enter the uni- 
versity, merely to matriculate, surely the compulsory sub- 
jects ought to be as few as possible. It seems to me that 
the most important thing is that every student should have 
had an early education through his own language, English ; 
should be able to write an account in English of anything 
he had seen; should have some acquaintance with what are 
called English subjects, such as geography and history and 
the principles of natural science, and the power to make 
simple computations. All the teaching is to be in English, 
all his companions speak English; there are good English 
books on all subjects, there are English translations of all 
the good books that have been written in foreign languages. 
I am afraid that no Oxford man can understand the 
following statement, which I make as a man of some ex- 
perience, speaking with a full sense of responsibility. So 
abominable do I think compulsory Latin or Greek, or French 
or German, that I believe a board school to be a much 
better school than any other for a boy if he is fitting him- 
self for any profession in which applied science is important. 
I can understand why Tom Sawyer and his friends, when 
they started their gang of robbers, initiated them through 
passwords and a ritual. That was for “‘ side.’”’ The gang 
did not consist of pirates or robbers; they were innocent 
young boys, and their passwords and ritual were the 
essence of the romance of the thing. This compulsory Latin 
and Greek for the average youth at Oxford seems to me 
merely grown up Tom.Sawyerism, and it is allied in obvious 
ways to the worship of mumbo-jumbo. It used to be 
that the use of fur on clothes was reserved for the higher 
classes. At another time gentlemen only were allowed to 
wear swords. In China and Japan certain buttons and 
coloured dresses indicated certain rank. In our own time 
there are fashions of slang which distinguish the smart set 
of society. The survival of Latin and Greek as com- 
pulsory subjects is very much the same sort of thing. It 
1 It is very interesting to me to note that on the very day when I wrote 
this sentence, after dinner, amusing myself and not in any way for the 
purposes of this address, I happened to be reading the “* Life of Plutarch’ 
written by the Langhornes, and these words caught my eye :—‘‘ Another 
principal advantage, which the ancient mode of the Greek education gave 
its pupils, was their early access to every branch of philosophical learning. 
They did not, like us, employ their youth in the acquisition of wo ds; they 
were engaged in pursuits of a higher nature ; in acquiring the knowledge of 
things. They did not, like us, spend seven or ten years of scholastic labour 
in making a general acquaintance with two dead languages. Th se years 
were employed in the study of mature, and in gaining the elements of 
philosophical knowledge from her original economy and laws. 
