Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/32

22 the discoveries and inventions of a few modern scientific investigators. The world to-day is looking more to the future than to the past, and its great and successful men are those who know the laws which govern men and things and obey them. The direct loss to the silk industries of France in a few years was two hundred and fifty million dollars, and would have increased had not Pasteur studied the nature of the minute organism which caused the trouble, and found a means of relieving the silkworm of its presence. Had the antiseptic treatment of wounds been known thirty years ago, at least one hundred thousand lives might have been saved during the war of the rebellion. Nature punishes ignorance as sharply as willful disobedience. Incapacity and crime receive the same punishment. Certainly he who knows her laws and can add to our rapidly increasing amount of knowledge of the mysterious ways in which Nature works, is as liberally educated a person as the pedant who has had his memory trained by years of classical study.

In general, I object to that complete begging of the question which assumes that an education to be called liberal must be obtained by a course of studies comprised within any hard-and-fast lines. Recognizing the demand for a more extended and broader curriculum, the colleges have enlarged their courses, and some of them have recently changed their requirements for admission. This change must have come sooner or later. I wish to show that this change was a wise one, and also to make this suggestion, that other colleges, in addition to the privilege given the candidate of offering either Greek or a substitute, should follow the example of the few who have established an elementary course in Greek for undergraduates.

There is no substantial reason why the secondary schools should teach the elements of all the studies pursued in the colleges, and that has never been attempted or suggested for all the college courses. The colleges have always offered elementary courses in some subjects, and one course more or less would not materially affect the grade of the college. Why not offer an elementary course in Greek as well as in Hebrew or Sanskrit or modern languages? The colleges themselves complain that they are now forced to give elementary instruction in English and no instruction in several important European languages.

This would enable those who are uncertain as to their future to defer making their decision until later in life, when, if they chose to select Greek, they could bring to the study more mature judgment and the advantage of training in other subjects, and for such students Greek would no longer be a school study, but a learned study worthy of the college. Also, students who came from schools where Greek is not taught would be debarred neither