Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/96

88 extent this was due to the attention he began to give to his mother tongue and to the great authors of his own and of neighboring lands. Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Horace, did something for him; but what was that compared to the intellectual wealth of the new world of science and the vivid inspiration that came to him from the pages of modern thought? To deny this is to refuse to see the light of the noonday sun. Poets like Dante, Shakespeare, Molière, Schiller, Goethe, took a powerful hold of his imagination, refined his moral nature as no ancient poet could, and tilled his soul with ideals of the modern world. Voltaire and Hume, Rousseau and Diderot, Carlyle and Kant, Herder and Lessing, taught him how to reason, and to deal with the problems of modern life. And to-day can it be truly said that the inspiration the German student draws from Plato and Aristotle can be compared to the powerful impulse and the incomparable intellectual help he receives from contemporary writers like Humboldt, Ritter, Peschel, Schleiden, Haeckel, and a host of others in various fields of science and philosophy in his own land, and, among neighboring nations, from the pages of a Charles Darwin, a Huxley, Tyndall, Claude Bernard, and entire galaxies of others?

We may repeat, therefore, that the German gymnasium teaches Latin and Greek as specialties, and that if this special training has not shown in its students the bad effects that are usually attributed to such training, the merit of having prevented these effects lies with those other studies which, as we have seen, occupy the student for the other half of his time. If, now, we compare the courses of the corresponding American schools with those of the Prussian (or German) gymnasium, we find that, while the American school has the same studies, it does not succeed in doing the same work. Hence, in order to make up for the deficiency of time, the preparatory training is continued in the college proper. But if the object were to give the American student as thorough a training in the Greek and Latin, without neglecting the other studies taught in the German gymnasium, the entire time of the college would be taken up by these so-called preparatory studies, so that the college would have no time, or but very little, left for other work. This is a very serious objection to the adoption of the German system, and the only alternative would be to establish our preparatory schools exactly on the same basis as the German gymnasium. But would this be desirable, even if it were feasible?

Unquestionably the habit of constant application for so many years, during which his study-hours are twice as numerous as those of his American colleague, while his vacations are briefer and his days of recreation fewer, makes the German student unusually capable to profit by further instruction after having passed through the gymnasium. He is very accurate in some knowledge, and perhaps the very fact that he has specially emphasized a few branches so that now he