Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/58

50 If you do not make the investigator a schoolmaster, as Dalton was, and as practically our professors are at the present time, with the duty of teaching all branches of their sciences, the mere elementary truths as well as the highest generalizations being compressed into a course, it is well that they should be brought into contact with the world in which they live, 60 as to know its wants and aspirations. They could then quicken the pregnant minds around them, and extend to others their own power and love of research. Goethe had a line perception of this when he wrote:

 "Wer in der Weltgeschichte lebt, Wer in die Zeiten schaut, und strebt, Nur der ist werth, za sprechen und zu dichten."

Our universities are still far from the attainment of a proper combination of their resources between teaching and research. Even Oxford and Cambridge, which have done so much in recent years in the equipment of laboratories and in adding to their scientific staff, are still far behind a second-class German university. The professional faculties of the English universities are growing, and will diffuse a greater taste for science among their students, though they may absorb the time of the limited professoriate so as to prevent it advancing the boundaries of knowledge. Professional faculties are absolutely essential to the existence of universities in poor countries like Scotland and Ireland. This has been the case from the early days of the Bologna University up to the present time. Originally universities arose not by mere bulls of popes, but as a response to the strong desire of the professional classes to dignify their crafts by real knowledge. If their education had been limited to mere technical schools, like the Medical School of Salerno, which flourished in the eleventh century, length but not breadth would have been given to education. So the universities wisely joined culture to the professional sciences. Poor countries like Scotland and Ireland must have their academic systems based on the professional faculties, although wealthy universities like Oxford and Cambridge may continue to have them as mere supplements to a more general education. A greater liberality of support on the part of the state in the establishment of chairs of science, for the sake of science and not merely for the teaching of the professions, would enable the poorer universities to take their part in the advancement of knowledge.

I have already alluded to the foundation of new colleges in different parts of the kingdom. Owens College has worthily developed into the Victoria University. Formerly she depended for degrees on the University of London. No longer will she be like a moon reflecting cold and sickly rays from a distant luminary, for in future she will be a sun, a center of intelligence, warming and illuminating the regions around her. The other colleges which have formed themselves in