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MODERN METHODS OF SCIENCE. 579 
There are, no doubt, serious errors in the scientific training 
that students undergo at our various universities and schools, 
which are too much in the habit of making short cuts in going 
_ over the fields of science. We are in fact a fast people, as it is 
commonly expressed, and are not content to devote patient and 
laborious study to pursuits that can only be mastered in that way. 
A short time ago, a physician writing on this same error in rela- 
tion to his profession justly said that, while we have shortened 
distance by the railroad and the telegraph, the road to learning is 
the same as it was in the days of Socrates and Plato. 
The student is restless to become instructor, the lecture-room 
enticing him from his studies before they are half mastered ; con- 
Sequently his instruction to others is both meagre and imperfect. 
Our vast material interests draw the students from their labora- 
tories to undertake the conducting of mines and other important 
works. The consequence is, bad economy reigns in most of 
them ; and if it were not for the patient submission of the people 
of this country to high prices, many an enterprise would have to 
Suspend operations. 
But it is at the door of the educational institutions themselves 
that the greatest blame is to be placed. First of all, our univer- 
sities (or rather our so-called universities) are too numerous. 
owadays every college must have a scientific school attached, 
else-it is not thought complete; and the number of professors 
competent to fill the scientific chairs in all these institutions could 
not be easily supplied in this country. Were it possible, it would 
be far better to have fewer scientific schools, and to establish 
them on the broadest basis, with most liberal endowments, so that 
instruction could be imparted at some mere nominal cost to the 
Student, and to make their examinations of such a standard that 
the indorsement of these several schools would be a passport to 
the bearer of it wherever he might seek for employment in pure 
Science or in its applications. And furthermore, by a system of 
Well-endowed scholarships, to retain those specially gifted with 
taste and talent for pure science to devote their first years to 
labor in that direction. Owing to these defects in our system of 
Scientific education, American science is frequently reproached as 
being very deficient in pure and patient research. 
Now, while admitting that our. scientists have fallen short of 
_ What might have been expected of them, no one can deny that a 
a 
