SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XV. No. 362 



terests of man ; from ihem and from science now come the light 

 and advancement of the world. They became and remained the 

 asylums of free thought and conviction when Rome and all other 

 privileged orders declined, and their germs were brought and pi- 

 ously and early planted on these shores by our fathers. The term 

 is not only " the noblest in the vocabulary of science," but univer- 

 sities are the chief nurseries of talent, where is kept alive the holy 

 fervor of investigation that in its passion for truth is fearless of 

 consequences, and has never been more truly and loftily ideal than 

 now, when its objects of study are often most crassly material. It 

 is-their quality more than any thing else that determines not only 

 the status of the medical and all technological professions, but also 

 whether the legal profession is formal, narrow, mercenary, and un- 

 learned, as it seems now in danger of becoming in Germany ; be- 

 cause even the German universities, despite their great pre-emi- 

 nence in all other respects, are by general consent of the most 

 competent Germans themselves relatively weak in those depart- 

 ments which underlie the practice of law, or broadly based on his- 

 tory and social or economic science, informed in administrative ex- 

 perience, and culminating in judicial talent and statesmanship. 

 Universities largely determine whether a land is cursed by a fac- 

 tious, superstitious, half-cultured clergy, or blessed by ministers of 

 divine truth, who understand and believe the doctrines they teach ; 

 who attract and enlarge the most learned, and penetrate the life of 

 the poor and ignorant, quickening, comforting, and informing in a 

 way worthy the Great Teacher himself, and making their profes- 

 sion as it should be— the noblest of human callings. 



Compared with our material progress, we are not only making 

 no progress, but are falling behind in higher education. It has 

 been estimated that but five per cent of the practising physicians 

 of this country have had a liberal education, and that sixty per 

 cent of our medical schools require practically no preliminary train- 

 ing whatever for admission, while European laws require a uni- 

 versity training for every doctor before he can practice. Again, 

 we apply science with great skill, but create or advance it very 

 little indeed. Should the supply of European science, which now 

 so promptly finds its way here and fertilizes and stimulates to more 

 or less hopeful reaction our best scholars, and upon which we live 

 as upon charity, be cut off by some great war or otherwise, the un- 

 balanced and short-sighted utilitarian tendencies now too prevalent 

 here would tend toward the same stagnation and routine which 

 similar tendencies, unchecked, long ago wrought out in China. 

 We all most heartily believe in and respect technical and applied 

 science and all grades of industrial education, but these are as 

 much out of place in a truly academic university as money-changers 

 were in the temple of the Most High. 



But yet the fact that these and other evils and difficulties are now 

 so widely seen and so deeply felt, that endowments for higher 

 education seem now the order of the day, that the larg'est single 

 endowment in this country has already so effectively begun so 

 many reforms in scarcely more than a decade in Baltimore ; that 

 churchmen, statesmen, and business men now need only to see 

 their own interests in a way a little larger and broader, as they are 

 now tending to do, to co-operate more actively than they ever have 

 done in strengthening our best foundations, — such considerations 

 sustain the larger and more hopeful view that our country is al- 

 ready beginning to rise above the respectable and complacent 

 mediocrity still its curse in every domain of culture, and will show 

 that democracy can produce — as it must or decline — the very 

 highest type of men as its leaders. The university problem seems 

 to be fairly upon us. We now need men in our chairs whose 

 minds have got into independent motion, who are authorities and 

 not echoes, who have the high moral qualities of plain and simple 

 living and self-sacrificing devotion to truth, and who show to this 

 community and the country the spectacle of men absorbed in and 

 living only for pure science and high scholarship, and are not mere 

 place-holders or sterile routine pedagogues, and all needed material 

 support is sure to come. 



A word so characteristic here that it might stand upon our very 

 seal, is " concentration." Of this, our founder, in declining to 

 scatter his resources among the countless calls from individuals, 

 institutions, and causes, from excellent to vicious, and refusing us 

 as yet, in the one work he has setoout to accomplish, no needed 



thing, sets an example. We have selected a small but closely re- 

 lated group of five departments, and shall at first focus all our 

 means and care to make these five the best possible. Neither the 

 historical origin nor the term " university " have any thing to do 

 with completeness of the field of knowledge. The word originally 

 designated simply a corporation with peculiar privileges, and 

 peculiarly independent to do what it chose. We choose to assert 

 the same privilege of election for ourselves that other institutions 

 allow their students, and offer the latter in choosing their subjects 

 a larger option between institutions. The continental habit of 

 inter-universily migration, also, on the part of students, if once 

 adopted here, would no doubt stimulate institutions no less than it 

 has stimulated competing departments in the same university. 

 Our plan in this respect implies a specialization as imperatively 

 needed for the advanced students as it would, we admit, be un- 

 fortunate for students still in the disciplinary collegiate stage. If 

 our elementary schools are inferior to the best in Europe, and if 

 our fitting schools are behind the French Lycee, the German 

 gymnasium, and the great English schools, it is our universities 

 that are comparatively by far the weakest part of our national sys- 

 tem. The best of these best know that fifty or one hundred in- 

 structors cannot do the work of three hundred and fifty ; that they 

 cannot hope at present to rival European governments which erect 

 single University buildings costing nearly four million dollars each, 

 as at Berlin and Vienna, nor equal the clinical opportunities of 

 large European cities with poorer populations and more concen- 

 trated hospital Systems. Our strongest universities are far too 

 feeble to do justice to all the departments, old and new, which they 

 undertake. Our institutions are also too uniform ; the small and 

 weak ones try to copy every new departure of the stronger ones, 

 as the latter copy the far stronger institutions in Europe. If the 

 best of them would do work of real university grade, should they 

 specialize among the fields of academic culture, doing well what 

 they do, but not attempting to do every thing, the American sys- 

 tem might yet come to represent 'the highest educational needs of 

 the country. In contrast with the present ideal of horizontal expan- 

 sion and the waste of unnecessary duplication, we believe our de- 

 parture will be as useful as it is new. 



Again, concentration is now the master word of education. In 

 no country has the amount of individual information been so great, 

 the range of intelligence so wide, the number of studies attempted 

 by young men in colleges and universities so large for the time 

 and labor given to each, the plea for liberal and general, as distinct 

 from special and exclusive-studies, been so strong. This is well, 

 for general knowledge is the best soil for any kind of eminence or 

 culture to spring from, and because power, though best applied on 

 a small surface, is best developed over a large one, and not in 

 brains educated, as it were, in spots. More than this, our utilitarian 

 ideal of general knowledge is far more akin to that of Hippias, who 

 would make his own clothes and shoes, cook his own food, etc., or 

 to that of Diderot, who would learn all trades, than to the noble 

 Greek ideal of the symmetrical all-sided development of all the 

 powers of body and mind. The more general knowledge the 

 better; but every thing must shoot together in the brain. In the 

 figure of Ritcher, the sulphur, saltpetre, and charcoal must find 

 each other, or the man makes no powder. The brain must be 

 trained to bring all that is in it to a sharp focus withoiit dispersive 

 fringes. The natural instinct of every ambitious youth is to excel ; 

 to do, or make, or know something better than any one else, to be 

 an authority ; to surpass all others, if only in the most accuminated 

 speciality. Learning thus what true mental freedom is, he is more 

 docile in all other directions. 



If it be extravagant to say that no minds are so feeble that they 

 cannot excel, if they concentrate all their energies upon a point 

 sufficiently small, nothing is more true than that the greatest pow- 

 ers fail if too much is attempted. This is not only a wise instinct 

 that makes for economy, but, in the parliamentary committee- 

 rooins, in corporation meetings, in the court room, in business, in 

 science, in the sick-chamber, the modern world in nearly every de- 

 partment is now really governed by experts, — by men who have 

 attained the mastery that comes by concentration. The young 

 man who has had the invaluable training of abandoning himself to 

 a long experimental research upon some very special but happily- 



