718 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



ery department of education, art and science that comes within its scope or func- 

 tion. Medical students are not merely to be taught the names and uses of bones, 

 muscles and organs, or the practical applications of medicines, but also the subtle 

 actions of brain and nerve ; not merely anatomical structures, but the mysterious 

 physiological processes; they are to be taught to "minister to a mind diseased" 

 as well as to set a broken limb. Students in other departments are also to be in- 

 structed not only in the routine of practical forms, but in all the mental processes 

 by which such forms are arrived at and made common and practical. Mr. Sill, 

 in discussing Herbert Spencer's theory of education says: " There is a perma- 

 nent aspiration in man for spiritual enlargement, for higher and richer planes 

 of intellectual being. This aspiration has in every age reached out, no doubt 

 more or less blindly, after whatever was greatest and best in preceding human 

 attainment." * -i^ * " From many desires and motives, no 



doubt, but most of all from this permanent hunger for intellectual illumination 

 and spiritual enlargement have grown up our universities and our systems of lib- 

 eral culture." He would be a strange teacher of medicine who at the present 

 day would content himself with informing his class that blue mass was "good for 

 biliousness," and that morphine was "good for sleeplessness," and fail to lay be- 

 fore them any explanation of the subtle and mysterious action of those agents up- 

 on the liver and brain. That was the old-fashioned, machine way of teaching, 

 and the result was that men went through their lives bleeding, salivating and 

 blistering their patients by rote, and deeming themselves lucky when they had 

 thrown them into fits, for the reason that you have all heard so many times. If 

 it had happened in the formation of the human system that the liver had been 

 left out, such doctors, as I have heard one of our most respected and progressive 

 city physicians say, would have been "in a mighty bad fix." 



But such crude and empirical instruction has been abandoned in all intellec- 

 tual communities, and every effort is put forth by professors, whether of medi- 

 cine, law, science or literature, to combine instruction with investigation, and to 

 enlarge by all their powers the bounds of human knowledge. The responsibili- 

 ties resting upon them are hot easily measured. In these days of unsettled beliefs 

 the importance of furnishing young men with a firm foundation of classified 

 knowledge and of well balanced habits of thought cannot be overestimated. A 

 failure to accomplish this in our universities is not only to perpetrate an inesti- 

 mable wrong upon the students themselves, but to do more or less permanent in- 

 jury to the cause of education in the community. The one object to be kept in 

 mind by all earnest and faithful instructors is the exclusive pursuit of the truth in 

 whatever line of study they may be engaged, and this is to be done by adherence 

 to facts, known and resulting from investigation, and by the generalization of the 

 facts in exact accordance with the laws of reasoning and thought. These pre- 

 cedent points being fully established, the professor need have no hesitation in 

 taking his pupils wherever logic leads. Truth thus sought will bear exposure 

 under all circumstances. 



This brings us back to Darwin again. His theories have become so com- 



