Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/691

Rh and only as it thus comes is it entitled to be considered real knowledge. We now study subjects for what there is in them, so that the knowledge gained may be a help to thought; and the enthusiasm thus acquired begets new ideas. The youthful mind requires something tangible to grasp, or the reasoning faculties are slowly developed. In all scientific works, facts are used as an index to ideas, which is not a tax upon memory, but a stimulus to the intellect. Still "it is not for its facts, but for the significance of its facts, that science is valuable."

The time is forever past of the old idea that the study of the ancient classics, mathematics, and humanities is the only education. And the once popular notion that a broadly educated man is a sort of intellectual reservoir that can be tapped for all sorts of miscellaneous information is equally absurd. The social consideration which once attached to persons supposed to know Latin and Greek, whether gentlemen or not, has been abandoned, and the test of social rank now is what they are and not what they are supposed to be.

The benefits generally claimed to come from a classical education are that it affords an admirable intellectual training, opens up a magnificent literature, and contributes very largely to the right understanding of our native tongue. This is certainly all true, but such intellectual training is derived as easily from other sources, for when the modern languages are taught systematically they are useful in the same way, if not in the same degree; while the natural and physical sciences are admitted now by our best thinkers to be the most powerful agents in the development of the intellect. Their literature, to the great majority of university men is unknown; but the scholar who has laboriously studied for a dozen years or more over his Virgil and Sophocles is generally but little better acquainted with ancient literature than he who has spent a year upon adequate translations of the famous originals. And the understanding it gives us of our own language, which in utility means accuracy, grace, and ease of expression, might, I dare say, be more easily attained in boyhood through formative habits, if guided scientifically, rather than through the endless mysteries of syntax and inflection.

The study of the classics is no longer essential, except in traditional schools. A well-known New York book merchant recently said, when asked about the demands for works on Latin and Greek: "We keep very few of the classics, and it doesn't pay to stock up any more. There is absolutely no demand for them, and a perfectly equipped bookstore can be sustained nowadays without a single classic on the shelves. Probably five times a year we have a call for one, and it doesn't pay to keep a stock for these stray demands." How many modern orators employ quotations from