Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/188

176 means, and the no less necessary recognition of coworkers and youth. Here, again, are afforded in intercourse with academic youth, motive and opportunity to attract pupils to co-operation and to train successors in the work. The continuity in scientific labor, to which Germany owes a large part of its success in this field, certainly depends chiefly on this association of investigation and teaching at our universities.

How closely the history of science in Germany in the last century is connected with the history of the universities is made plain in the work of Lexis on the German universities, published in 1893, at the instance of the Minister of Worship. Every step forward in research and its permanent interweaving with the regular work is associated with the foundation of new chairs and new institutes at the universities. Most evident is the growth in the extension of the philosophical and medical faculties. Instead of the eight or ten chairs in the philosophical and the two or three in the medical faculty, which were regarded as sufficient in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we have at the middle and smaller as well as at the larger universities three and four times as many, including the extraordinaries, and even six and eight times. The institutes of every kind nearly all date from the last century.

The German people have expended and are expending every year much on their universities. No other people proportionately devotes so large sums to the endowment of its high-school instruction. We may well say that it has not been a fruitless application of capital, and hope that it will not be in the future. The present repute of the German name among the nations of the earth has grown in no small degree out of its universities. It has sometimes been pointed out that the teaching work of the incumbents of some of the chairs—that of Oriental languages, for instance—has been very insignificant; the cost, per head, of the instruction given has been counted up and found to be high; and it has even been proposed to maintain chairs for such specialties only at two of the large universities. Such calculations are niggardly and not just. The existence of a large number of chairs is not of little importance to the permanence of the scientific achievements of the German people in these fields, even though we are not a wealthy people. The few thousand marks which are paid to the merit of men like Rückert and Bopp ought not to be regarded by any one as wasted, even though their work were substantially null. The university chair in Germany is at the same time a form of endowment for scientific labor. It is the external stimulus to strive for distinction in a kind of work which has at present no marketable value, and makes it possible to devote one's self to it permanently. If it produces work of inferior money value, in what field does not such work slip in?