Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/753

Rh in education is to bring these various influences together as much as possible. There is no knowledge which is not science, and there can be no applied science without the basis of pure science on which to rest. Schools of applied knowledge can not be legitimately separated from schools of knowledge. But, whatever the use made of the money, the passage of the Morrill Act in the interest of applied science has given scientific work a prominence in our colleges it did not have before. It has given science definite rights in the curriculum, where before it seemed to exist by sufferance.

I congratulate the State of Illinois that its university is one university; that its pure and applied science, its literature, history, philosophy, and art are taught in one institution by a united faculty. The best results in any line of education can not be reached without the association of all others. The training of the engineer will be the more valuable from his association with the classical student. The literary man may gain much, and will lose nothing, from his acquaintance with the practical work of the engineer. The separation of the schools founded by the Morrill Act from the State university, as we have seen in nearly half the States of the Union, was a blunder which time will deepen into a crime. With the union of the two has come the rapid growth of the Universities of Wisconsin, Illinois, California, Minnesota, and Nebraska, where the higher work of the State is concentrated in one place.

The freedom of choice has not worked to the advantage of science alone. The element of consent in college study has brought about a revival in classical education as well. It is not certain, even, that more science studies are chosen on the elective system than were taken on the old plan of a required curriculum. But the work is done in a different spirit. Colleges and investigators are being drawn together. There is no line of investigation in which the college can not help, if the investigators have freedom to use it. The scientific men are being drawn into sympathy with higher education. Men are now in college who under the former system would have been self-made men, with all the disadvantages that isolation implies. Education gives the ability to enter into the labors of others, and the scientific man of to-day must use every advantage if he is to make his own work an advance in knowledge. He must know what has been done by those who have gone before him. He must stand upon their shoulders if he would look further into the mysteries of Nature than they. Science can not for a moment let go of its past; and to the self-made man of science, struggle as he may, the books of the past are at least partially closed.

The men of science twenty-five years ago the college repelled,