Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/789

Rh probably be much promoted. The notion that true learning consists rather in exercising the reasoning faculties and laying up a store of useful knowledge, than in overloading the memory with words of dead languages, is becoming daily more prevalent. It is hard to deny a young gentleman the honor of a college, after he has with much labor and painful attention acquired a competent knowledge of the sciences, of composing and speaking



with propriety in his own language, and has conned the first principles of whatever might render him useful or creditable in the world, merely because he could not read a language two thousand years old." This letter might well be dated from Boston a century later, for it was nearly a century before such ideas of the essentials of an education were gaining ground with our foremost educators. The literary societies established in 1795 took mottoes in keeping with the spirit of the day, that of the Dialectic Society being "Love of Virtue and Science," and