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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXII. No. 826 



mentor of student manners and morals 

 gives six columns to a football game and six 

 lines to a great intercollegiate debate. Such 

 is the difference between precept and prac- 

 tise. American laurels are for the giant 

 captain of industry; when his life is 

 threatened or taken away acres of beauti- 

 ful forest are cut down to procure the 

 paper pulp necessary to set forth his 

 achievements, while our greatest astron- 

 omer and mathematician passes away and 

 perhaps the pulp of a single tree will suf- 

 fice for the brief, inconspicuous para- 

 graphs which record his illness and death. 



Tour British coiisin is in a far more fav- 

 orable atmosphere, beginning with his 

 morning paper and ending with the con- 

 versation of his seniors over the evening 

 cigar. As a Cambridge man, having spent 

 two years in London and the universities, 

 I would not describe the life so much as 

 serious as worth while. There are humor, 

 and the pleasures of life in abundance, but 

 what is done is done thoroughly, well. 

 Contrast the comments of the British and 

 American press on such a light subject as 

 international polo; the former alone are 

 well worth reading, written by experts and 

 adding something to our knowledge of the 

 game. In the more novel subject of avia- 

 tion we look in vain in our press for any 

 solid information about construction. Or 

 take the practical subject of politics; the 

 British student finds every great speech 

 delivered in every part of the empire pub- 

 lished in full in his morning paper; as an 

 elector he gets his evidence at first hand 

 instead of through the medium of the edi- 

 tor. 



Thus the young American is not lifted 

 up by the example of his seniors, he has to 

 lift it up. If he is a student and has seri- 

 ous ambitions he represents the young salt 

 of his nation, and the college fraternity in 

 general is a light shining in the darkness. 



Thus stumbling, groping, often misled by 

 his natural leaders, he does somehow or 

 other, through sheer force, acquire an edu- 

 cation, and is just as surely coming to the 

 front in the leadership of the American na- 

 tion as the Oxford or Cambridge man is 

 leading the British nation. 



Our student body is as fine as can be, it 

 represents the best blood and the best im- 

 pulses of the country; but there may be 

 something wrong, some loss, some delay, 

 some misdirection of educational energy. 

 Bad as the British university system may 

 be, and it has been vastly improved by the 

 influence of Huxley, it is more effective 

 than ours because more centrifugal. Eng- 

 lish lads are taught to compose, even to 

 speak in Latin and Greek. The Greek 

 play is an anomaly here, it is an annual 

 affair at Cambridge. There are not one 

 but many active and successful debating 

 clubs in Cambridge. 



I believe the greatest fault of the Amer- 

 ican student lies in the over-development 

 of one of his greatest virtues, namely, his 

 collectivism. His strong esprit de corps 

 patterns and moulds him too far. The re- 

 wards are for the "lock-step" type of man 

 who conforms to the prevailing ideals of his 

 college. He must parade, he must cheer, to 

 order. Individualism is at a discount; it 

 debars a man from the social rewards of 

 college life. In my last address to Co- 

 lumbia students on the life of Darwin,^ I 

 asked what would be thought of that pe- 

 culiar, ungainly, beetle collector if he were 

 to enter one of our colleges to-day? He 

 would be lampooned and laughed out of the 

 exercise of his preferences and predispo- 

 sitions. The mother of a very talented 



" " Life and Works of Darsvin," Popular Science 

 Monthly, April, 1909, pp. 315-340. (Address de- 

 livered at Columbia University on the one hun- 

 dredth anniversary of Darwin's birth, as the first 

 of a series of nine lectures on " Charles Darwin 

 and His Influence on Science.") 



