78 THE FLORIST AND 



PROM THE (UNPUBLISHED) INTRODUCTORY LECTURE AT 



NEWARK COLLEGE. 



BY PROF. S. S. HALDEMAN. 



As long as the processes of labor were simple, that is, until a compara- 

 tively recent period, they were easily acquired, so that there was no neces- 

 sity to teach them in the seminaries of learning. But as soon as a taste 

 was developed for anything which required more than ordinary skill, special 

 schools arose, as those of medicine and the fine arts ; and some system of 

 apprenticeship (which is a kind of manual labor school) probably arose when 

 certain indispensable articles were required to be better or neater than those 

 designated by the term home-made. 



The construction and application of machinery has greatly enlarged the 

 constructive faculty of the mind, demanding a modification of education in 

 localities where the wants of it are greatest; and schools of applied art 

 arise when taste becomes a necessary adjunct in manufactured articles. The 

 bounds of chemistry have been extended from medicine, to a wide range of 

 manufacturing prooesses ; and in our own day, its profoundest generaliza- 

 tions have various practical applications in the animal and vegetable econo- 

 my; so that as a study in abstract, as well as applied science, it has acquired 

 a permanent place in the higher institutions devoted to general educa- 

 tion, instead of the equivocal position once assigned to it, when it was fre- 

 quently made a mere book recitation, with perhaps the exhibition of a few 

 ordinary phenomena, dignified by calling them "experiments." 



Until the necessity arose for the modern extended generalization of sci- 

 entific principles, to adapt them to operative pursuits on a large scale, the 

 practical in education was, as we have seen, of minor importance. More 

 recently, the connected interests both of industry and learning have suffer- 

 ed, not from any disposition to do the former injustice, but because it has 

 developed itself so rapidly in new directions, as to have temporarily ob- 

 scured the mutual relation of the two, like that of gold and silver in a cur- 

 rency, when the production of one exceeds that of the other in some great 

 and sudden, but unknown degree. 



Although obscured for a time, the mutual relations of the different de- 

 partments of knowledge are getting to be appreciated, but not equally in 

 different localities. The colleges of Harvard, and of Yale, have a depart- 

 ment of practical science. Princeton is about organizing a chair of applied 

 science ; and in the University of Pennsylvania arrangements of a similar 

 kind are in progress. The result of this movement will be a recognised 

 class representing instructed labor, as definite as the professions, arts, and 

 trades. 



