Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/210

196 being an essential requisite for the A.B. degree), and this linguistic power is more easily acquired in early youth than afterward, when the mind is engrossed with severer studies.

This broadening of the requisites for admission is the last step in a series of changes by which, at Harvard College, scientific culture has been placed on the same footing as literary culture, and recognized as an equally fitting preparation for the degrees in arts. Those who have advocated these changes have seen clearly from the first that the study of natural science could not compete with the study of literature as a means of culture unless the discipline were equally severe, and unless legitimate scientific methods were strictly followed. To master a scientific subject as a body of systematized truth, and present it elegantly at a written examination, is a literary work, and the ability to do this work well is a normal result of literary training. The nature of the subject-matter does not essentially alter the character of the mental effort, and the power of ready acquisition and clear expression works very much in the same way, whether the material fashioned be science, history, or literatui'e. This literary power is a talent of the very highest order, in many professions the one power needed, and in all professions a power of great value. But it is not the scientific power. It is not the power by which the physician investigates disease, by which the navigator crosses the ocean, or the geologist explores a continent; it is not the power by which a large part of the practical work of modern civilization is accomplished. The true test of scientific power is the ability to interpret Nature, and this can only be acquired by cultivating to the utmost—1. The perceptive faculty, by which observations are made; 2. The delicate manipulation required in experimenting; and, 3. The inductive method of reasoning by which correct conclusions are drawn from the results of observation or experiment. Moreover, long experience has shown that the old literary methods of education, so far from tending to cultivate the scientific faculties, rather tend to blunt them, and therefore that, without unusual native talent, the best results of scientific training can not be attained unless we begin with pupils at an early age. It is easy to awaken among college students a taste for natural science, and all the easier on account of the barrenness of their previous studies; but, so long as the average college student is not taught to use his perceptive faculties until that late stage of his education, it is obvious that the standard of scientific culture in our higher institutions of learning can not compare with that of the literary culture which has engrossed the attention of the student from childhood. We can not reach a standard that will command general respect until we can secure real science training in the preparatory schools. The acquisition of scientific knowledge by the study of text-books, however excellent in themselves, will not in the least degree promote this end, unless possibly by awakening a desire to study Nature. What we require is, that the eye should