December 30, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



981 



where. Paulsen conld never conceive that 

 any of the great scholars of England 

 should be professors in an English univer- 

 sity. The work of the university, with its 

 gowns and hoods, its convocations and de- 

 grees, its taking seriously the state-gov- 

 erned church and the hereditary aristoc- 

 racy, seeins so alien to the life of the great 

 scholar that one can not conceive his taking 

 part in them. And yet great scholars have 

 done just this. They have developed in 

 just this atmosphere, drinking from the 

 real fountains of learning hidden within 

 the univei"sity, and not from the drippings 

 of the gargoyles with which medievalism 

 has adorned its exterior. 



In like fashion, we could not conceive of 

 the young Darwin, in a claw-hammer coat 

 in the afternoon defending his one major 

 and two minors, with a thesis which no one 

 will ever read, on a topic leading up a 

 blind alley, as a doctor in any German uni- 

 versity. But even this, or much worse or 

 more incongruous, might happen to a Dar- 

 win or a Huxley, or a Lyell or a Gray, or a 

 Helmholtz, an Agassiz or a Gegenbaur, 

 were such to grow up into the universities 

 of to-day. Externals count for little, and 

 all these things are external. The man, the 

 teacher and the contact with nature — these 

 are the only realities. The beginning is in 

 the man, his ability, his "fanaticism for 

 veracity," and his persistence in the work. 

 The university can not make the man. It 

 can not wholly shut him away from objec- 

 tive truth, even if it tries desperately to do 

 so, and its principal influence is found in 

 the degree to which it grants the inspira- 

 tion of personalit}-. 



The reading of good books can not be re- 

 garded as an element peculiar to any sort 

 of university training. A good mind seeks 

 good books and finds them. Shakspere, 

 Coleridge and Lyell were just as accessible 

 to me or to you as they were to Darwin. 



Tliey are just as accessible to anybody any- 

 where. Time to read them is not even es- 

 sential. One secret of greatness is to find 

 time for everything in proportion to its 

 worth to us. A further advantage is ours 

 in this generation. We have the "Origin 

 of Species" and the whole array of fructi- 

 fying literature arising from this virile 

 stem. 



The only possible element in which the 

 American university could fail is that of 

 the influence of personality. Can it be that 

 this infl^uence is wanting? Do our men no 

 longer "walk with Henslow," as once they 

 walked with Gray and Silliman and 

 Agassiz ? 



Do our men go to the university for the 

 school's sake and not for the men who are 

 in it? Is it true that as our universities 

 grow in numbers and wealth, their force as 

 personal centers or builders of schools of 

 thought are declining? To some extent 

 this is certainly true. Once when a young 

 naturalist went in search of training and 

 inspiration, he went to Agassiz. He did 

 not go to Harvard. He scarcely thought 

 of Harvard in this connection. Agassiz 

 was the university, not Harvard. The 

 botanist went to Gray. He did not go to 

 Harvard. Later the chemist went to Rem- 

 sen, the phj^siologist to Martin, the anato- 

 mist to Wall, the morphologist to Brooks. 

 That these four men happened to be to- 

 gether at Johns Hopkins was only an inci- 

 dent. The student went out to find the 

 man, and he would have followed this man 

 around the world, if he had changed from 

 one to another institution. 



I saw the other day a paper of an irate 

 Gei-man morphologist who in attacking a 

 certain idea as to the origin of fishes' arms 

 and ours, denounced "die ganze Gegen- 

 baurische Schule," who followed Gegen- 

 baur in his interpretation of this problem. 

 Never mind the contention. The point is 



