Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/697

Rh, 1667, physics and mathematics have had their full and abundant share in the curriculum of this university. If, therefore, there has been a greater leaning toward physics and applied, as distinguished from pure mathematics, it has been accomplished, almost unperceived, under the guidance of men like Stokes, Thomson, Clerk Maxwell, and his successor, Lord Rayleigh, who combine the highest powers of numerical analysis with the imaginative, constructive, and inventive faculty of Wheatstone and Faraday.

At the sister University of Oxford the case is very different. Here the method of the schoolmen and the misrepresented teaching of Aristotle reigned supreme until our own time. The anachronism was indeed expressed in concrete form by a single word. The "science" which up to 1852 formed one foot of the tripod, with scholarship and history, on which honors were adjudged, was the science of a thousand years before, the metaphysics and moral philosophy of the Stoics of those who, proposing to teach it, wrote over the entrance to their school, οὕδεμετος ἀγεομετρήτος εἵσιτο, which, in the terms we are now using, may fairly be translated, "Let none unacquainted with physics enter." It was a purely mental analysis of the great problems even then seen to underlie our simplest conceptions of the universe. The change required in this center of learning was therefore from metaphysics to physics; it was a scientific putting of the cart before the horse; a substitution of Pythagoras or Archimedes for Plato or Aristotle, as the latter then and there were studied; namely, in his dogmatic treatises on ethics, politics, rhetoric, and metaphysics, and not in his far stronger genius as a natural historian and zoölogist.

Is it to be wondered that the wrench thus suddenly given produced molecular change; that the impulse overran the neutral point; and that those who previously had been commended for accurate knowledge of the metaphysical attributes of God should require time to learn the internal economy of a Holothurian, the exact chemical constitution of ethylic-diethyloxamate, or the formula for Carnot's reversible heat-engine? Even now, within an ace of thirty years from this intellectual cataclysm, poor old Oxford is only just recovering from a protracted state of vertigo, and settling down again to useful work. It is sad that she should have to chronicle the early loss of one who has been a main agent in the revolution. The Linacre Professor of Physiology [Dr. Rolleston], who began as an orthodox first-classman in the school of Litteræ Humaniores in 1850, dies in 1881 at the age of fifty-two, an advanced exponent of modern views in anthropology.— Popular Science Review.