American Forest Congress 35 



and this leads me to the question, "What should be the 

 attitude of our universities toward forestry?" 



Is not a university a place of universal search for 

 universal truth ? Let whoever is disposed to be impa- 

 tient of the progress that is being made reflect upon 

 the history of recent university development. We must 

 look backward in order to look forward. 



It was not until late in the last century that science 

 received recognition, and provision was made for its 

 teaching. When graduates of American colleges real- 

 ized that they had failed to get what they needed for 

 their life work and that there was a strong prejudice 

 against the admission of applied sciences on a proper 

 basis, they began to endow coordinate faculties, which 

 continued for a long time as separate faculties, and 

 are not even now completely assimiliated. It was some 

 time also before pure science, which had been taught 

 in a most elementary way, met with a suitable response 

 — that chairs were established and equipments pur- 

 chased. Who does not recall the crusade of science 

 against philology and the conflict which was waged 

 almost unremittingly for half a century or more 

 between the advocates of classical and scientific study ; 

 the latter claiming that we must reconstruct our aca- 

 demic and university systems after the inspiration of 

 modern ideas, and must substitute those studies which 

 would be more efficient in their disciplinary value and 

 more useful by reason of their .closer affinities with the 

 practical tendencies of our modern scientific life; the 

 former, while admitting freely the claims of science, 

 maintaining that the classics were needed more than 

 ever to resist the utilitarian and materialistic tendencies 

 of the age, and that an education cannot be full-orbed 

 and rounded off without the classics. Greek and Latin 

 had been supreme for so many centuries that the physi- 



