Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/68

58 science into the ordinary university course, to which I have alluded. It is a difficulty which will not be overcome, until years of patient study have organized scientific teaching as well as, or I hope better than, classical teaching has been organized hitherto.

A little while ago, I ventured to hint a doubt as to the perfection of some of the arrangements in the ancient universities of England; but, in their provision for giving instruction in science as such, and without direct reference to any of its practical applications, they have set a brilliant example. Within the last twenty years, Oxford alone has sunk more than a hundred and twenty thousand pounds in building and furnishing physical, chemical, and physiological laboratories, and a magnificent museum, arranged with an almost luxurious regard for the needs of the student. Cambridge, less rich, but aided by the munificence of her chancellor, is taking the same course; and, in a few years, it will be for no lack of the means and appliances of sound teaching, if the mass of English university men remain in their present state of barbarous ignorance of even the rudiments of scientific culture.

Yet another step needs to be made before science can be said to have taken its proper place in the universities. That is its recognition as a faculty, or branch of study demanding recognition and special organization, on account of its bearing on the wants of mankind. The faculties of theology, law, and medicine, are technical schools, intended to equip men, who have received general culture, with the special knowledge which is needed for the proper performance of the duties of clergymen, lawyers, and medical practitioners.

When the material well-being of the country depended upon rude pasture and agriculture, and still ruder mining; in the days when all the innumerable applications of the principles of physical science to practical purposes were non-existent even as dreams—days which men living may have heard their fathers speak of—what little physical science could be seen to bear directly upon human life lay within the province of medicine. Medicine was the foster-mother of chemistry, because it has to do with the preparation of drugs and the detection of poisons; of botany, because it enabled the physician to recognize medicinal herbs; of comparative anatomy and physiology, because the man who studied human anatomy and physiology for purely medical purposes was led to extend his studies to the rest of the animal world.

Within my recollection, the only way in which a student could obtain any thing like a training in physical science was, by attending the lectures of the professors of physical and natural science attached to the medical schools. But, in the course of the last thirty years, both foster-mother and child have grown so big, that they threaten not only to crush one another, but to press the very life out of the unhappy student who enters the nursery; to the great detriment of all three.