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1 882.] The Highest Education and its Difficulties . 
of the Universities themselves. To what extent and from 
what point of view is this actually the case ? We see in 
faCt that splendid laboratories, fitted with every modern 
appliance for research, have been created. We find that 
chemistry, physics, biology, &c., are receiving some amount 
of recognition even though greeted with such contemptuous 
bye-names as the study of “ stinks and bones.” But in in- 
troducing new studies do we not still pursue them too much 
in the old manner? We teach say, Biology, but as some- 
thing to be examined in, rather than as something to make 
discoveries in. The laboratories which have been so muni- 
ficently founded, and in some cases even endowed, have not 
begun to pour forth even the first tricklings of a stream of 
researches such as flow from Berlin, Munich, Strassburg, 
even from Kasan and Perm. It has been well said that if 
the mediseval scholastics had possessed Newton’s “ Prin- 
cipia,” or Darwin’s “ Origin of Species,” they would have 
simply treated it as they did the writings of Aristoteles — 
made it the foundation of an infinity of verbal subtleties and 
quibbles. Just so we ; give us what new subjects you please 
we simply misapply them. 
Again the University reform spoken of is found wanting 
at the very outset. The man who enters an English Uni- 
versity is still treated on the Procrustean principle. No 
matter what may be his especial powers, his tastes, his 
ultimate objects, there is imposed upon him one common 
course. So long as this uniformity is demanded from all 
alike, so long, we venture to say, will the English Uni- 
versities be poor in original research. Very similar in their 
spirit are the remarks of Prof. Bickerton and the eminent 
authorities whom he quotes. All agree that our Universities 
are someting quite different from what we might reasonably 
expeCt, from what the honour and welfare of the nation 
demand, and it may be added, from what their founders and 
benefactors originally intended. Thus the Rev. Mark 
Pattison, ReCtor of Lincoln College, Oxford, declares “ the 
colleges were in their origin endowments not for the elements 
of a general liberal education, but for the prolonged study of 
special and professional faculties of men of riper age.” 
Mr. Pattison again complains that the “ colleges have 
become boarding schools in which the elements of the 
learned languages are taught to youths.” The present con- 
dition of things he pronounces “ nothing less than a state of 
national destitution and intellectual blight.” Matthew 
Arnold, after declaring that it is the function of the Univer- 
sity to develope into science the knowledge a boy brings 
