SCIENCE.-SUPPLEMENT. 



FRIDAY, JULY 16, 1886. 



ON THE PRESENT ASPECT OF CLASSICAL 

 STUDY.' 



The chance that made me the first professor 

 appointed to a chair in this university has made 

 it my duty to represent the school of letters on 

 this festal day, which has been chosen for the 

 commemoration of the first completed decennium 

 of our existence as an institution. The work of 

 the university, so far as it can be expressed by 

 lectures and by publications, by the number of 

 teachers and of students, by the hours spent in 

 laboratory and seminary, is all of record. Judged 

 even by the census standard of facts and figures, 

 it will be granted that what has been done here 

 in the last ten years does not fall short of the 

 standard which was set up in 1876. Less meas- 

 urable, but not less certain, are the indications of 

 our influence on the whole circle of university 

 work in America ; and, whatever we may have 

 failed to do, we have assuredly not failed in rous- 

 ing to greater vigilance, and stimulating to a 

 more intense energy in other parts of the wide 

 field ; and, whether in the way of approval or in 

 the way of protest, our example has made for 

 life and growth and progress. This life and 

 growth and progress have found a material ex- 

 pression in the erection and equipment of model 

 laboratories foi- biology, chemistry, physics. De- 

 partments that are less tangible in their material 

 and in their methods have little to show the visitor 

 except a few books and a goodly number of men, 



— ardent students, who are busy with old prob- 

 lems and new, enriching themselves with the 

 spoils of the past, laying up store for those who 

 are to come after them, in the present neither 

 envious nor afraid. As to this whole department 

 of letters, then, — that department which has 

 naturally fallen most under my own observation, 



— I can truly say that the healthy increase in the 

 schools of language and literature is something 

 that has transcended my most sanguine expecta- 

 tion. In numbers we outrank many of the minor 

 German universities ; and in the more abstruse 

 and recondite studies, such as Assyrian and San- 

 scrit, we hold our own with some of the leading 

 schools of Europe. As for our American sisters, 



1 Address delivered at the tenth anniversary of the 

 Johns Hopkins university. 



it is not so easy to separate graduate work from 

 undergraduate work in other xlmerican univer- 

 sities as it is here ; and hence the comparison 

 of numbers might not be fair, and might be mis- 

 interpreted ; and instead of emphasizing too much 

 our large number of graduate students, it may be 

 better to say in regard to all the schools of the 

 country in which higher work is done, that we 

 count their success as our success, for we are all 

 helpers one of another. And here I would take 

 occasion to echo the wish, which I have often 

 heard expressed of late, that the university de- 

 partments in all American institutions of learning 

 might be so organized that students could pass 

 from one to the other in the prosecution of a line 

 of study just as they do in Germany, much to the 

 advantage of their breadth of vision, their free- 

 dom from local or personal influence. For my 

 own part, I have always congratulated myself 

 that I was brought under the influence of three 

 distinct and markedly distinct philological schools, 

 — Berlin, Gottingen, and Bonn, — ■ and I have no 

 doubt that, when the time comes, there will be a 

 university exchange that will helj) us even more 

 than the measure of it that we have thus far 

 enjoyed. We then of the department of letters 

 have our success to speak of on this day when a 

 little 'self-esteem grounded on just and right ' may 

 be pardonable, if not, as Milton says, profitable. 

 But it is a success that carries with it the gravest 

 responsibilities. The ark we bear contains more 

 sacred vessels than it held when we set out ; and 

 on an occasion like this it becomes us not only to 

 exchange hearty congratulations that we have 

 been helped thus far on our way, but to renew 

 our hold with greater vigor, and to plant our feet 

 more firmly, with a clearer view of the path to be 

 trod and the burden to be borne. 



To some, I do not know to how many, certainly 

 to some of those whom I am addressing, the 

 special line of work to which my own life has 

 been devoted may seem to have had its day ; and 

 to plan for the future of Greek is to plan for an 

 elaborate structure on the foundation of some 

 table rock, destined at no distant time to faU and 

 disappear on the restless current of modern life. 

 A monument was erected some years since to the 

 memory of the last old woman that spoke 

 Cornish ; and it would require no great stretch of 

 imagination on the part of some of our friends to 

 fancy that some youth may be present here to- 

 day who shall live to see the cremation of the last 



