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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXII. No. 827 



popular conception of a liberal education 

 is no longer confined exclusively to the 

 humanities. All are now agreed that the 

 study of the natural sciences affords a 

 training and a discipline quite as worthy 

 of recognition , toward the A.B. degree as 

 that afforded by the study of language, 

 philosophy, and mathematics. Moreover, 

 no one can longer lay claim to a liberal 

 education who has not by formal and seri- 

 ous study made himself familiar in a broad 

 and comprehensive way with the funda- 

 mental principles of the biological and 

 physical sciences. I hope that no one will 

 understand me as belittling in the least the 

 value and importance of literary studies. 

 These branches of study are essential to the 

 training of any individual, but they pre- 

 sent but one side of that training which the 

 world is now pleased to call a liberal edu- 

 cation. History, which opens up to us the 

 accumulated treasures of the centuries; 

 economics and the social sciences, which 

 show us the relation of man to man and to 

 organized society ; language and literature, 

 which reveal to us the thought and the 

 masterpieces of other tongues and of other 

 peoples, are all essential elements of a lib- 

 eral education, but none the more so than 

 are the facts and phenomena which show 

 the relation of man to the animate life with 

 which he is surrounded, or to the laws of 

 the inanimate world with which he must 

 deal in every-day life. All of these ele- 

 ments are necessary in the training of any 

 man who would longer lay claim to a lib- 

 eral education in any significant sense of 

 that term. 



When in 1824 there was established a 

 physiological laboratory at Breslau and in 

 the following year Liebig opened at Giessen 

 his chemical laboratory fully equipped for 

 the use of students and investigators, there 

 was introduced into education a new and 

 very important influence. Stimulated by 



these centers of scientific activity and by 

 the laboratories of Berzelius in Sweden and 

 Gay-Lussac in Paris, the necessity of labo- 

 ratory instruction spread with great rapid- 

 ity to the sciences in general until to-day 

 the laboratory as an educational factor, has 

 come to take its place alongside the library 

 as the two most important features in the 

 equipment of a modern educational insti- 

 tution. The introduction of the laboratory 

 and of laboratory methods of dealing with 

 problems of research has introduced in all 

 fields of human thought an entirely new 

 method of attacking problems of investiga- 

 tion. Formerly, when a scholar wished to 

 investigate a subject, he merely sat down 

 and philosophically meditated concerning 

 it. As a mental performance it was not 

 altogether without value, but scientifically 

 the results were not unfrequently of little 

 or no consequence. To-day, due to that 

 scientific spirit which has come to pervade 

 all investigation, the process is quite differ- 

 ent. The first business of the investigator 

 now is to determine all the facts relating to 

 the question under consideration and then 

 by a study of those facts to deduce general 

 laws. We must not, however, make the 

 mistake of assuming that the influence of 

 the scientific spirit has been confined alone 

 to the branches of science. It has spread 

 to the study of the humanities themselves; 

 and we have a good deal to say now-a-days 

 about the scientific method of studying his- 

 tory, economics and philology. Indeed, so 

 far has this method been applied to sub- 

 jects other than the natural sciences, that 

 those branches of study which have to deal 

 with the relations of man to man, both past 

 and present, including therefore economics, 

 sociology and history, are often spoken of 

 as "the social sciences." 



I have said enough perhaps to show the 

 importance and wide-spread influence of 

 scientific study so far as it has come to be 



