§42 JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 
good common sense of the students, that most of them take 
their mother tongue as one of the five subjects for their B.A. 
degree. It appears from this curious medieval arrangement, that a 
student entering the New Zealand University is considered to 
know English sufficiently if he has passed his matriculation ex- 
amination in it. You will agree with me that no student can 
claim to be possessed of true culture if he is not thoroughly ac- 
quainted with his mother tongue, if he cannot speak and write 
with acertain degree of perfection, and is unacquainted with the 
accumulated treasures of its literature. Now this is partly sacri- 
ficed with us for the accomplishment of a dead language, chiefly 
because it has been the principal subject from the very dawn of | 
the dark middle ages. Certainly, if we must have compulsory 
subjects in our curriculum, one of them ought to be English. 
It almost appears to show a contempt for the language of Shake- 
speare and Byron, of Locke and Macaulay, Lyell and Darwin. 
A similar feeling in regard to the vulgar tongue continued to 
exist also in Germany, in later mediaeval times—German being 
only used in the elementary schools. In the secondary or mo- 
nastic schools, and at the Universities, Latin continued to be the 
medium through which the rising generation was instructed. 
Even Luther, that giant of energy and intellect, could obtain but 
one concession, that in a number of secondary schools, founded 
or re-modelled after the Reformation, the pupils should be 
taught in German; the Universities still continue to use Latin. 
And notwithstanding that Luther had shown in his own 
works what a beautiful and expressive language German was, all 
his friends and companions in arms during the great work of the 
Reformation still continued to write in Latin. However one 
eminent man, Paracelsus (Bombastus von Hohenheim), living in 
the sixteenth century, had the courage as Professor of Medicine, 
in the University of Basle, to lecture in German instead of using 
barbarous Latin. It can easily be imagined how deeply his 
colleagues were shocked by this want of esprit de corps, and 
what a howl of pious indignation was raised against him, for 
using such a vulgar tongue as the German language, spoken by 
the common people. There is no doubt that Paracelsus, to whom 
we owe several valuable discoveries in Medicine, still of general 
use at the present time, was a most remarkable man, possessing 
very high attainments and unusual knowledge. However, the 
accounts handed down to us by his contemporaries present us 
with only a caricature. It has been shown that many facts con- 
cerning his life and works have been greatly distorted, and that 
his enemies were innumerable. This was a natural consequence 
of having been in advance of his time ; he wanted progress with 
too great a haste for his contemporaries, and in many instances 
introduced valuable reforms, and thus raised amongst the mass of 
his co-workers a storm against him, under which he at last suc- 
cumbed. 
It was only towards the end of the seventeenth century that 
Professor Thomasius, of the University of Halle, began to lec- 
