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Courtney explained it at the University. To this day we know no higher pleasure in the way of instruction than to teach a bright youth the reason why, in dividing by a fraction, you must invert and mul tiply. It is perhaps in teaching arithmetic that the danger is greatest of that merely mechanical instruction which is so often observable in large classes, and is therefore particularly to be dreaded in our public schools. What well-known educator has not been taken around in a carriage along with other gentlemen by the energetic Superintendent of public schools in some city, and expected to admire the performances of a crack class in oral arithmetic, when the operations betrayed no sign of thinking, but were performed by dint of a drilling as mechanical as the manual of arms? A mechanical drill in the use of weapons, or in calisthenics, is a very good thing in its place. But school instruction ought to contemplate something more than mere practical facility in the repetition of certain definite processes. Apart from the supreme matter of mental development and discipline, the practical processes of arithmetical calculation,-for example, in bank discount, or in interest where payments have been deferred, are so varied and often complicated that one must have learned to think about arithmetic, or he cannot be trusted to do the work. The Greeks probably gave their pupils as much mental discipline in teaching arithmetic and geometry as we do through the calculus and celestial mechanics. As they had not the so-called Arabic (really Indian) numerals, and represented numbers by letters of the alphabet, the simple processes of multiplication and division required serious mental effort. These readily become for us an almost mechanical process, and geometry is in many respects greatly simplified. Yet, let us nowhere be satisfied with imparting the mere mastery of practical processes, but teach pupils to think. The very word man signifies thinker, the root being akin to the verb mean and the noun mind. Do not make bright children mere calculating machines, make them think. And do not allow yourself to be a machine for dictation and inspection, but bring your own active mind in contact with the mind of every pupil. Many teachers of large classes find this difficult, of course, but they must strive to overcome the difficulty by every means in their power.

One more article will venture to offer hints as to certain other subjects of elementary instruction.—Rev. J. A. Broadus, D. D., in Religious Herald.

66

Science and the Classics.

[Address of Archdeacon Farrar at the Johns Hopkins University.]

Archdeacon Farrar was introduced. He is tall, of a kindly countenance, and speaks with great eloquence and rapidity. He said: You must pardon me if I feel a little confused at being called upon unexpectedly to address an assembly like this. I was under the impression until yesterday that I was to have a familiar and perhaps pedantic talk with the students and scholars of the University, and not to address the rank, fashion and beauty of Baltimore. No one can read the reports and publications of this institution without seeing that it undertakes to teach the wide range of sciences. Successive generations of American youth are here to be taught and, self-governed, are to sit at the feet of law. God has many bibles as well as the Bible. He speaks through all the branches of knowledge-psychology, mathematics, history, law, art and sciences.

"In teaching the laws of nature your professors are endeavoring to lead you through nature up to nature's God. The exhaustiveness of the curriculum is nothing less than a distinctive sign of the time. Fifty years ago in England no university of a similar character to this existed. The exclusive education was in the classics in a narrow and pedantic way. Boys were allowed to grow up in ignorance unfathomable-an ocean without bottom and without shores. It was a system by which such boys as Parr grew up as prodigies, and such boys as Humphrey Davy and Sir Walter Scott as little dunces. Boys were allowed to grow up in ignorance of the beauties of English literature, of modern languages, and indeed much that is best worth knowing in the two languages, for which the other branches were ruthlessly sacrificed. Many years were spent, I may say, in not acquiring forms of the verbs, or in not writing elegiac couplets. The Latin prose, unless it was made up of mosaics from the ancient authors, would have made Quintilian gasp, and their Greek would have made Athenian school-boys laugh. I did endeavor to contribute all in my power toward giving that system its death blow.

"When I was a young schoolmaster boys were obliged to spend their time writing Latin prose, and not a single English school had a science master. The universities were also cramped. At Cambridge mathematics obtained recognition, but at Oxford mathematics had few adherents. I may speak of these things because they are matters of the past, and we have changed all that and begun to give attention

to every branch of human knowledge. I must pause if I seem to be expressing hostility to the study of those languages. My object was to destroy the absolute autocracy of the classics, not to destroy the study of them. For in them are enshrined the noblest thoughts of the noblest history of the noblest nations of antiquity. My object then was only to plead that the study of Latin and Greek should not be exclusive; now I plead that it should not be excluded. The study of Greek and Latin, thanks to the development of comparative philology, has become a science. We are the children, after all, of the past, and a comprehension of the laws of nature must not exclude the law of man, who is part of nature. The past lives and tingles in every particle of our body. The exclusive domination of Latin and Greek was due to their inherent power. The renewal of the study at the Renaissance let in a flood of light upon mar.kind, and their riches flowed in like a vernal breeze upon the minds of those cramped by scholasticism. We can appreciate the influence when we read of Erasmus studying by moonlight to avoid the expense of a candle; of Queen Elizabeth's versatility in Latin and Greek, and of Lady Jane Grey, a young girl, neglecting the pleasures of the chase to read Plato's "Phædo." Cobden is reported to have said (I only know it through the newspapers) that a single copy of the Times was of more value than the writings of Thucydides, but I cannot agree with that.

"Greek and Latin are worthy of study if only for the beauty and grandeur of the languages. They are among the greatest instruments of thought, and we cannot neglect those languages without damage to ourselves. Besides their beauty and grandeur, they have been enriched by the grandest thoughts of great artists. Greek was not only the language of Homer, of Hesiod, of Plato, of Epictetus, and of Marcus Aurelius, but it is the language of revelation; the New Testament was written in Greek and the Old Testament was translated into it. It was the language of the ancient fathers; of the sermons of Socrates; St. Paul spoke it, and in it St. Chrysostom thundered his words. It is also the language of the modern Athenian newspapers.

"Latin was not only the language of Virgil, of Jerome, of Augustine, but for a long time it was the sole medium of communication between European scholars. It was the language of freedom, of theology from Tertullian to Thomas Aquinas, of legislation from the laws of the twelve tables to those of William the Conqueror. Even now it is the means of communication of strangers of different

tongues. By it the great discoveries were handed down to posterity. Therefore you see that these languages cover vast realms of thought. "Yet an immense service has been wrought for modern education by the widening of the curriculum. A man may be a perfect scholar in the old, narrow sense, and yet know nothing of the sun, the gulf stream, the trade winds; be ignorant of the nature of rains and dews, of the lightning, the rainbow, the mirage. This age is peculiarly an age of science and progress. In the fifteenth century was Columbus, in the eighteenth Newton, but the nineteenth is of all others absolutely unsurpassed. Our civilization, and especially in this country, has spread with almost indescribable rapidity. The log huts of the woodsmen have grown into cities, mountains have been tunnelled, and the virgin forests have resounded with the noise of the steam engine. Everywhere man has left his mark. It would have been disgraceful if education was to have been left stationary. "One great reason for satisfaction is that the diversities of the modern education enable men of different minds to follow their bent. The minds of men differ radically. Some men, like my friend the late Dean Stanley, are interested in the nature and thought of man; others breathe most freely in regions of the abstract. Charles Darwin said that at school he had learned nothing with the exception of that which he had taught himself by private experiments in chemistry, and when the head master discovered him, instead of encouraging him he reproached him before all the form with being a "poco currente," which he thought a dreadful name. St. Bernard is so dead to outer impressions that he travels all day along Lake Geneva and then asks where the lake is, while Linneaus is so sensitive to the beauties of nature that when he beholds a promontory standing boldly forth and teeming with beauty, he cannot help falling upon his knees and thanking God for such a world. It is not wonderful, then, that men of such different minds despise each other. It is the scorn of men's mutual ignorance.

"Every ideal university must, therefore, have appliances for the study of the whole circle of human sciences. Let me speak of the immense delights of scientific study. God has placed us in a world which he means us to admire. There are beauties and wonders, and God made them all. It is impossible to measure the difference of degrees of happiness of a man with a seeing eye and a hearing ear and of another who has grown up blind and deaf to his surroundings. God has given us the instinct of beauty, and there is no greater proof of His being than the fact that He has placed around us the

means of gratifying those instincts. It is amazing to think what the world might have learned by grasping the simplest facts around us. But it was only to the mind of Newton that the simple falling of an apple suggested the great law of gravitation. To Watts the condensation of steam upon a spoon revealed the secret of the steam engine. Galileo, watching the swinging of the great bronze lamp in the cathedral at Pisa and measuring it by the beating of his pulse, discovered the isocronism of the pendulum. Huyghens looked through a piece of iceland spar and put into our hands a means of reading the secrets of the stars. All these things may be called accidents, but they are accidents which happen only to trained and observant minds, and I think that even now there are other open secrets about us, and that the discoveries of modern times might have been made earlier if minds had been properly trained.

"Science is remarkable for its enormous strides. I need but give one illustration-the progress of the science of electricity. The ancient Greeks had discovered that electricity was generated by rubbing a piece of amber. Consider the immense advance since their time. We know now that lightning is nothing more than what a lady may brush from a cat's back or from her own hair. Benjamin Franklin, with nothing more than a boy's kite, a piece of hempen cord, and a key dashed to the ground the majestic power. But what an immense stride has been made since the days of Franklin, particularly in the laying of the first Atlantic cable! Surely this great progress is one of the special glories of science.

"Let me add a word more as to the beneficence of science. She has not only revealed infinite time, infinite space, and infinite organism, but she has been a great archangel, hovering beneficently over mankind. She economizes labor, extends human life, and extinguishes human pain. She restores sight to the blind, mitigates madness, and tramples upon disease. After all these enormous services she ought to be cultivated, and we congratulate the university devoting so much to the subject.

"Whether our education be in the sciences or in the languages, we must set steadily before us the one great object we are to obtain. Some wish to know only to know; some to be known, this is vanity; some to sell their knowledge, this is base covetousness; some to edify, and some to be edified. But the great object is to learn to see and know God here and to glorify Him hereafter. Our education is that we may become profitable members of the church and the community, and hereafter to partake of the glories of an immortal resur

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