228 



NA TURE 



[July 9, 1896 



propose and dispose the courses of study ; lecturers carry 

 their behests into effect. The initiative is in the hands 

 of the tutors who, with few exceptions,- are classical, some 

 few being mathematical, and only three scientific. By 

 excluding scientific men from tutorships the Oxford 

 colleges keep science at arm's length. 



Three causes, then, militate against the increase of the 

 scientific school at Oxford : the absence of any test of 

 scientific acquirements in responsions and in most college 

 entrance examinations, the severity of the Greek test, 

 and the exiguous number of science tutors in colleges. 

 These causes might easily be removed, but Oxford does 

 not remove them, and, as a whole, it is unwilling to 

 do so. At the bottom of it there is the wish that it 

 should remain in the present what it has been in the 

 past — the home of classical studies and of metaphysical 

 philosophy. There may be those who would maintain 

 that a university has the right to determine what courses 

 of study should be characteristic of it. But it may be 

 urged that the function of a university is not to be ex- 

 clusive. Should it not rather be its duty to recognise 

 and bestow its approval on the intellectual movements 

 which have done, and are doing, most for the advance- 

 ment of mankind? He would be singularly blind to 

 what is going on around him who would deny that 

 natural philosophy has been the great intellectual move- 

 ment of this century, and that its methods and con- 

 clusions have been forced, willy-nilly, on every form of 

 study that exists. But blindness seems to be prevalent 

 among the majority at Oxford, or if not blindness, then 

 wilful obstinacy. For its graduates, in their capacity as 

 members of the University, have been obliged to give 

 public sanction to science, and to spend large sums of 

 money in making provision for teaching it. 15ut in their 

 more private capacities, as Fellows of Colleges, they 

 stultify themselves by stopping the stream at its fountain- 

 head. The endowments of colleges were given for the 

 advancement of religion and sound learning. In times 

 gone by sound learning meant Cireek, and why ? Be- 

 cause Greek literature contained not only all the meta- 

 physical, but also all the natural philosophy known to 

 the world. It is long since Artistotle has ceased to be 

 the authority in natural, that he still is in metaphysical, 

 science. But in the course of change the authorities 

 have clung to .-Vristotle, and the endowments which 

 originally were devoted to all sections of his work are 

 now confined to only a part of them. The schoolmen, 

 Duus .Scotus amongst them, argued with as much subtlety 

 about the scientific as about the logical teachings of 

 .\ristotle, and in so far imitated the spirit as well as the 

 letter of the Greeks. Nowadays the letter remains, but 

 the spirit is lost to the classicists, and has gone over, 

 deprived of its material endowments, to science. How 

 much longer will Oxford cling to the belief that it is the 

 language in which they wrote, rather than the spirit in 

 which they worked, which made the Greek philosophers 

 the fathers of thought? It is indeed a curious satire on 

 a modern classical education that the very things in 

 which the Greeks were most interested are those which 

 the (u-eek student of to-day most disparages. 



It is to be hoped that Oxford will become awake to 

 the unreasonable attitude which it has adopted towards 

 natural science, unreasonable alike from the point of 

 view of modern requirements and of the purposes of the 

 philosophers whom it professes to venerate. For its 

 own sake it is to be hoped that the awakening will come 

 from within ; if it does not, it will assuredly come from 

 without. The University has just had a reminder of the 

 dissatisfaction which was felt with the place assigned to 

 science in its local examinations, and it has made haste 

 to repair the defect. The dissatisfaction with its external 

 examinations is as nothing compared with the growing 

 dissatisfaction with its internal system, which, if left 

 unremedied, must prejudice its reputation and de- 



NO. 1393, VOL. 54] 



stroy the influence which it possesses in the intellectual 

 world. 



Let it be said, in conclusion, that there are many at 

 Oxford who are classical to the core, yet would willingly 

 do all that is required for the advancement of natural 

 science. They are mostly to be found among the 

 middle-aged, not among the younger graduates. If 

 certain actions of classical O.xford have been condemned 

 in what precedes, exception is of course made of the 

 more liberal minority, whose actions, if left unfettered, 

 would be all that the most bigoted man of science could 

 desire. 



NOTES. 



We are informed that notification of the following additional 

 delegates to the International Conference on the Catalogue of 

 Science has now been received at the Royal Society ; — Austria : 

 Prof. Ernst Mach, Prof. Edmund Weiss. Germany : Prof. 

 Walther Dyck (Munich), Prof. Van 't Hoff (Berlin), Prof. 

 Mdbius (Berlin), Prof. Schwalbe (Berlin), Oberbibliothekar 

 Wilmanns (Berlin). Norway: Dr. Jorgen Brunchor.st. The 

 list of delegates is therefore now a remarkably complete and 

 full one. 



■Sir Georc.e BAnEX-PowEi.i. has completed his arrange- 

 ments for taking an observing party to Novaya Zemlya to 

 observe the forthcoming solar eclipse. 1 le will be accompanied 

 by Dr. Stone, of the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford, and Mr. 

 Shackleton, of the Solar Physics Observatory, South Ken- 

 sington. 



Amom; the Civil List pensions showji in a return just laid 

 upon the table of the House of Commons, we notice a pension 

 of £zoo to Mrs. Huxley, one of ^120 to Mr. James Hammond, 

 and one of ;^I20 to Mr. Oliver Heaviside. 



Prok. van de Sande Bakhuvzen, Professor of Astronomy 

 in the University of Leiden, has been elected a Correspondant 

 of the Section d'Astrononiie of the Paris Academy of Sciences. 



Dr. Samuel Wilics, K.R.S,, Pre.sident of the Royal College 

 of Physicians, has been appointed one of her Majesty's Physicians 

 Extraordinary, in the place of the late Sir George Johnson. 



The death is announced of Prof A. (i. Stoletow, Professor 

 of Physics in the University of Moscow. Prof. Stoletow was 

 the author of several imjiortant memoirs on magnetism and 

 electricity, the velocity of sound, the critical state, and other 

 physical subjects. 



Sir Joh.n Pender, who was for many years prominently 

 associated with the promotion of submarine telegraphy, died on 

 Monday. It was largely due to his enterprise and faith in the 

 practicability of laying a submarine wire between England and 

 America, that the capital required to lay the Atlantic cable 

 of 1866 was subscribed. He also took a leading part in the 

 organisation and development of the Mediterranean, Eastern 

 (India and China), Australian, South .\frican, and Direct 

 African cables. It is .stated that the cable mileage of the sub- 

 marine telegraph companies over which he presided at the time 

 of his death amounts to 73,460 nautical miles. 



NoriiiNi; is safe from syndicates of speculators. From a 

 question asked in the House of Commons on Tuesday, it appears 

 that an attempt is being made to exclude the public from right 

 of way to the Giants' Causeway. Unfortunately that great 

 natural wonder is not public property, and cannot, therefore, be 

 protected from the syndicate which proposes to interfere with 

 the right of access to it. 



The distribution of prizes to the students of the Charing 

 Cross Hospital Medical School will t.ake place next Tuesday, 



