45o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



celebrating. Day before yesterday it was four hundred years 

 since Christopher Columbus descried the first land of that New- 

 World in which now many millions are joyously engaged in com- 

 memorating him. For him was the enviable fortune reserved 

 of demonstrating at a stroke, by a bold experiment, the truth of 

 the theory that the earth is round, and of opening at the same 

 time to human enterprise the widest field that had ever been un- 

 locked to it. Let us at this place bring the deserved offering to 

 his genius and his energy. Let us not forget that with him, not- 

 withstanding his mistakes, which have been perhaps made for the 

 moment too prominent, a new era began — an era of new thought 

 and new traffic. 



Then mental activity prevailed everywhere; great mathema- 

 ticians and physical astronomers of the first rank arose ; the great 

 reformation in the Church began, and the foundations of modern 

 medicine were laid. We are still in the midst of the movement, 

 but it is victorious everywhere. Our age has been called the sci- 

 entific age. None of the humanities have escaped this influence. 

 Even the Roman Catholic Church, which endeavored so earnestly 

 to restrain it, has joined it ; and an appointed representative of 

 the Evangelical Church, our honored colleague Dillmann, a few 

 years ago spoke in his rectoral address the strong words, "A 

 church which can not bear the light of science, or which has to 

 temper it with colored glasses, should be laid with the dead." In 

 fact, the modern doctrine of the universe is wholly built up on 

 the ground of natural science, and nobody can seriously deny that 

 it must be so. 



The question is therefore permissible, whether the youth of 

 our learned schools should not be advanced further than they are 

 now in this new knowledge. It can be readily granted that there 

 are still questions that have not yet been determined among the 

 learned concerning the instruction that should be excluded from 

 the schools and the instruction in specialties that should be re- 

 served for the universities. But we may ask that a young man, 

 credited with self-reliance enough to make good use of academical 

 freedom, shall be in a condition to absorb without danger the 

 leading facts of astronomy and biology. Can he be regarded as 

 really mature when the whole world around him is to a certain 

 extent closed to him ? And how can university instruction effect- 

 ively influence the young man if he is deprived of the instrument 

 he needs in order to carry on his hard work ? 



He needs mathematics, not for its own sake, and not merely 

 in order that he may understand the motions of the heavenly 

 bodies ; even physics has gradually become a mathematical sci- 

 ence ; and in chemistry and physiology it is becoming more and 

 more necessary to carry out minute calculations. By their aid 



