Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/787

Rh a large extent in our older colleges and in European universities. Among the subjects thus contracted by the pressure of the material arts and sciences may be mentioned mathematics, studied as an end, not as a means; logic, the science of thought; ethics, the science of conduct; classical literature; music, the most cultivating of the fine arts; and, to some extent, history and politics. Language is much studied, but more for utility than for culture. Hence Greek and Latin give way to the modern languages. But even language does not check our eye-mindedness. Here, if anywhere, one would suppose that the ear and tongue would be trained. Curiously enough, it is again the eye and hand. Greek and Latin are usually studied by sight. We learn to read them and possibly to write them, but not to understand or speak them. This is to some extent true also of modern languages. The French and German learned in our schools and colleges are the written rather than the spoken languages. Strange though it is, since language is the rightful inheritance of the ear and tongue, and is the very groundwork of our social life, that our young people should be found studying it silently in their several places, thumbing their pens and their printed dictionaries, yet the explanation is not far to seek. We are a reading rather than a speaking people, and the written language is of more use to us than the spoken. We care more to be able to consult French and German books than to converse with French and German people. To be sure, there is at present a wide-spread movement among language teachers to correct this evil; but, as a fact, language is studied in the same old way, and few students seem to understand that a language is not known unless it is known to the ear and tongue.

If now we seek the causes of our prevailing and increasing eye-mindedness, we shall find them chiefly in the invention and rapid extension of printing, engraving, and photography. These are the arts that have drawn so heavily upon our visual resources and made it so easy to dispense with the ear and the memory. The yearly increasing time given to reading and writing, compared with the time given to listening and speaking, is apparent to everybody. The present generation is a book-and-newspaper-reading generation. We get our politics from the daily paper, our art from the magazine, our science from the text-book, our amusement from the novel, our gossip from the biography, our facts from the cyclopædia. We speak of the man of education as the "well-read" man. He reads, of course, extensively in some special subject connected with his work or profession. As a foundation for this, however, he has read some standard works in mathematics, or philosophy, or physical science, or history, or philology. Of the classical writers he has, of course, read a few, such for instance as Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Schiller, Byron, Wordsworth, Burns,