578 



SCIENCE 



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



overworked word "service" every addi- 

 tion in every conceivable department of 

 human activity which is constructive of 

 society is service; that the spirit of science 

 is to transfer something of value from the 

 unknown into the realm of the known, and 

 is, therefore, identical with the spirit of 

 literature; that the moral test of every ad- 

 vance is whether or not it is constructive, 

 for whatever is constructive is moral. 



I would not for a moment take advan- 

 tage of the present opportunity to dis- 

 courage the study of human nature and of 

 the humanities, but for what is called the 

 best opening for a constructive career give 

 me nature. The ground for my prefer- 

 ence is that human nature is an exhaustible 

 fountain of research; Homer understood it 

 well; Solomon fathomed it; Shakespeare 

 divined it, both normal and abnormal; 

 the modernists have been squeezing out the 

 last drops of abnormality. Nature, 

 studied since Aristotle's time, is still full 

 to the brim; no perceptible falling of its 

 tides is evident from any point at which 

 it is attacked, from nebulse to protoplasm; 

 it is always wholesome, refreshing and 

 invigorating. Of the two most creative lit- 

 erary artists of our time, Maeterlinck, 

 jaded with human abnormality, comes 

 back to the bee and the flowers and the 

 "blue bird," with a deliciovis renewal of 

 youth, while Rostand turns to the barn- 

 yard. 



Henry Fairfield Osborn 



AMEBWAHi EDUCATIONAL DEFECTS 

 Optimism, the national trait, was for- 

 merly the keynote of American public 

 opinion. There used to be a serene confi- 

 dence in the perfection of all natural, polit- 

 ical or social conditions that seemed pe- 

 culiarly American, and an equa;lly serene 

 indifference, or even contempt^ for every- 

 thing that differed from them. Recently, 



however, all this has changed ; and we now 

 find American public opinion directing to- 

 wards native institutions and conditions a 

 criticism so uniformly severe, and a de- 

 nunciation so intensely bitter as to exceed 

 the completeness of its approval and the 

 fulsomeness of its praise in the past. 

 Higher education is one of the latest things 

 to be attacked, and as in the case of politics 

 and business, every shortcoming that is in- 

 evitable, and every weakness that is uni- 

 versal in a human institution has been at- 

 tributed solely to its influence. Under 

 these circumstances, it is perhaps permis- 

 sible to undertake an inquiry to determine 

 just what educational faults and deficien- 

 cies may be regarded as peculiarly Amer- 

 ican ; and there may be a certain advantage 

 in having this inquiry made by a person 

 who has come in contact with the educa- 

 tional system of this country, and yet has 

 not been identified with it long enough to 

 have come to regard its methods as natural, 

 or prominently enough to feel in any way 

 responsible for it ; for most of its critics 

 have been conspicuously lacking in per- 

 sonal knowledge of its orgaiiization, while 

 most of its defenders have been prejudiced 

 by regarding themselves as responsible for 

 the creation, or at least the toleration of 

 that organization and its results. 



The first step in such an inquiry will be 

 to establish what elements in an educational 

 system are most important in producing its 

 results, in other words, on what its effi- 

 ciency and vitality mostly depend. It 

 would seem at first sight as if this question 

 would have to be answered after the man- 

 ner of most pedagogical writers, that is, by 

 saying that an educational system 's success 

 depends, in the first place, on the sort of 

 knowledge it undertakes to impart, and in 

 the second place, on the methods it employs 

 to secure the assimilation of such knowl- 

 edge. A little thought, however, will show 



