622 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to compensate the stagnation of a thousand years. Thus far, 

 however, the speed of that progress has been sadly retarded by 

 the very means which once constituted its only hope of revival. 

 Instead of navigating the river of the new era in manageable 

 boats, scholars persisted in clinging to the wreck of their classic 

 observatory, to a cumbersome raft of old beams and planks which 

 got stranded at every turn of the stream, and often became a se- 

 rious obstacle in the channels of reform. The experience of the 

 last three hundred years has as yet failed to disassociate the ideas 

 of Latin and Greek from the scholastic notions of culture, and the 

 time may come when practical educators will almost fail to realize 

 the possibility of the fact that, in our own rapid age of discovery 

 and invention, millions of our most gifted students had to waste 

 from one-third to three-fifths of their time on the study of dead 

 languages. Witness the following curriculum of the German 

 Gymnasia, or high schools — the preparatory colleges of the best 

 European universities, and the gates to every highway of liberal 

 education : 



Latin, ten hours per week ; Greek, eight hours ; Hebrew, three 

 hours; German, four hours; mathematics, four hours; geog- 

 raphy, two; history, two; drawing, two; French, two; physiol- 

 ogy, two; religion, optional; English, optional (occasionally 

 taught instead of French) ; gymnastics, four hours. In other 

 words, twenty-one hours of graveyard studies to eighteen hours 

 of all living sciences taken together, since gymnastics has ceased 

 under certain circumstances to be a compulsory branch of educa- 

 tion. 



Those twenty-one hours devoted to the dead leave not a min- 

 ute's time for the study of such problems of life as biology and 

 rational hygiene; not a minute for anatomy, political economy, 

 philosophy, rhetoric, or non-sectarian ethics. Such things, of 

 course, are taught by the regular or special professors of the uni- 

 versity ; but a large percentage of students pass directly from the 

 primer-class of the gymnasium to the duties of practical life, and 

 in ninety-nine of a hundred cases may charge the long period 

 given to the study of the ancient languages to the budget of total 

 loss. Not one of a hundred non-philological students (gradu- 

 ates devoting themselves to the special study and the teaching 

 of ancient languages) would ever dream of continuing his anti- 

 quarian pursuits or be able to look upon a Greek or Latin text- 

 book without a shudder of disgust. It has been conclusively 

 proved that all the etymological benefit derived from linguistic 

 graveyards could be reaped in a single year by the study of root- 

 words (most of them familiarized by their French and English 

 derivatives). It has been demonstrated to the satisfaction of 

 every impartial thinker that grammar-drill is not the superlative 



