558 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
courses in masonry and stone cutting be added to the college cur- 
riculum. The plea is not consistent. The Hebrew people and the 
Hebrew Scriptures have had greater influence upon mankind than that 
exerted by the Greeks and Romans or their literature, yet no one has 
demanded that lads be drilled in the accents and paradigms of the 
Hebrew language. The Greeks owed their civilization to Egypt and 
Babylonia, yet no one has wept because the study of hieroglyphics and 
cuneiform is not a prominent feature in the curriculum of secondary 
schools and colleges. English translations suffice for these languages ; 
it is difficult to conceive why they should not suffice for Greek and 
Latin. 
It is not easy to discover grounds justifying diatribes against the 
changed attitude toward Latin and Greek as college studies. When one 
challenges the correctness of the classicist’s position, the good man seems 
to be shocked by the questioner’s audacity, he wanders amid generalities 
and usually finds relief in gloomy reflections respecting this utilitarian 
age. But the classicist forgets or does not know that, until very recent 
times, the study of Latin and Greek had nothing whatever to do with 
mental training, was not supposed to have any special value in that con- 
nection. It was as purely utilitarian as the study of bookkeeping in a 
commercial school, the erection of an anvil in a blacksmith’s shop or the 
purchase of a ticket before entering the train. The would-be student 
learned Latin just as he learned to read—that the road to knowledge or 
to preferment might be open to him. In the old universities lectures 
and text-books were in Latin; many of the Christian Fathers wrote in 
Greek and would-be theologians needed that language. ‘The university 
swas closed to the man ignorant of Latin as an American college is closed 
to the man ignorant of English. It was for this reason that when col- 
Jeges were founded in this land, the chief emphasis was given to the 
classic tongues; they were established merely as schools preparatory to 
the university work of theological seminaries, whose text-books were in 
Latin and Greek. 
But the Roman church lost control of the intellectual world; Latin 
ceased to be the universal language of scholars; lectures and text-books 
were given in the vernacular. Even theological seminaries, outside of 
the Roman church, discarded the old text-books and replaced them with 
modern works of less polemic spirit. Seventy-five years ago all excuse 
for keeping Latin and Greek in the college curriculum had disappeared. 
‘Those languages had held their place because of utility and that had 
disappeared. But the colleges were here, the largest of them very small ; 
their curriculum was a survival of the past, no longer useful, it was 
barely ornamental. A new era had been opened by the study of science, 
but those who controlled the colleges knew nothing of science and most 
of them thought of it only as an invention of the devil—a new way of 
