Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/31

Rh special cases for special purposes; and as between Latin and Greek the least deserving should be dropped. Latin is the mother tongue of so many modern European languages that it has its proper place antecedent to those languages.

3. Making Greek a sine qua non has debarred many from entering college who, through inaptitude or inability to procure good teaching, have been unable to pass their entrance examinations in that subject.

4. The time required for Greek has acted as a prohibition on many other studies.

5. Greek being a difficult language, not enough of it is learned to be of much practical service to the student. Huxley says: "It is only a very strong man who can appreciate the charms of a landscape as he is toiling up a very steep hill along a very bad road. The ordinary schoolboy is peculiarly in this case. He finds Parnassus uncommonly steep, and there is no chance of his having much time or inclination to look about him till he gets to the top, and nine times out of ten he never gets to the top." As to the disciplinary drill in Greek, it is by no means certain that it possesses any advantages over many other studies pursued with as much care and hard work.

Says Grant Allen: "Do you think that a man can not learn just as much about the Athens of Pericles from the Elgin marbles as from a classical dictionary or a dog-eared Thucydides? Do you suppose that to have worked up the first six Iliads with a Liddell and Scott brings you in the end very much nearer the heart and soul of the primitive Achæeans than to have studied with loving care the vases in the British Museum, or even to have followed with a sculptor's eye the exquisite imaginings of divine John Flaxman? Do you really suppose there is no understanding the many-sided, essentially artistic Greek idiosyncrasy except through the medium of the twenty-four written signs from alpha to omega?"

The old-fashioned classical education is an excellent and possibly necessary preparation for the legal, clerical, and pedagogic professions. It furnishes a capital training in words; it does not reach the facts behind the words; it is only plowing over again the old ground; it leaves each generation just where its predecessor was. It does not furnish either the methods or the material for originality. In the whole domain of science the classics afford a convenient terminology. That they give any useful fundamental preparatory training can not be demonstrated, and their study with this end in view is time wasted.

Greek history, mythology, philosophy, and poetry all together have less influence upon the civilization of to-day, less effect upon the prosperity, happiness, and general welfare of mankind than