544 JOURNAL OF SCIENCE, 
has been accomplished. Is not our own University little more 
than a monastic school? Are not Latin and Mathematics the 
chief disciplines to which the greater portion of the time at the 
disposal of the student has to be devoted? Of course the 
secondary schools preparing candidates for the University have 
to follow a similar course, and thus in their turn pay the 
greatest attention to these two favored subjects, often to the 
neglect of others. No wonder that our boys and girls when 
they enter our secondary schools, and find that most of their 
time is to be devoted to Latin and Mathematics, consider them 
of primary importance. They at once begin to look upon the 
other subjects as of much less value, and therefore very seldom 
heartily devote their youthful energy to them. And what sad 
disappointment awaits them when they enter life, and find that 
just those things they ought to have studied as necessary for 
their intellectual and material welfare, have been utterly 
neglected. Of course, having heard that their fathers have 
undergone the same training, and having seen their younger 
friends do the same, they consider it the fate of mankind to 
unlearn to a great extent, in the world, what they have learnt at 
school. If they have any ambition or wish to improve them- 
selves, they have then to set to work to fill up the gap in their 
knowledge—in many instances a process of great difficulty. 
Probably I shall be told that I am exaggerating, but in that 
case I appeal to my hearers, and I am certain that they will 
bear me out in my assertions. And although we are still at this 
early medizval stage, there is ample proof that during the past 
few centuries many men, having the welfare of their nation at 
heart, have been bent upon the intellectual improvement of our 
educational system. They have reasoned with great force that 
the true school ought not to work for itself, but for life—the 
real life—that it should follow the progress of mankind, and 
assimilate to itself all the great intellectual discoveries, so that 
when the pupil goes out into the world he should be at once in 
contact with life; his power of observation having been ex- 
panded, that he should know himself and the world surrounding 
him. Onleaving school,the future citizen ought to know his duty 
towards mankind. He should feel that by participating in the 
blessings of civilisation he has to live up to the state of general 
culture surrounding him, and to assist in advancing it to the 
best of his abilities. In one word, there should never exist a 
contrast between life and school. 
From Bacon, Ratichius, and Comenius, to Matthew Ar- 
nold, Huxley, Spilleke, and Wiese, this great evil in the 
present school system has been bitterly bewailed; and 
Matthew Arnold, in his excellent work, “ Higher Schools 
and Universities in Germany,” on page 179, forcibly points 
out “that the philological and mathematical disciplines 
ought not to be an end in themselves, but only a preliminary 
step to the knowledge of nature—they ought only to be a ladder 
to the main object of teaching a knowledge of the world, and of 
, 
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