Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/540

534 At the date when this will was signed, July 9, 1790, the following colleges were in operation in the United States:

In Yale College we find the following courses offered for the session of 1702:

(1) Latin, five or six orations of Cicero; five or six books of Virgil; talking college Latin; (2) Greek, reading a portion of the New Testament; (3) Hebrew, Psalter; (4) Some instruction in mathematics and surveying; (5) Physics (Pierson); (6) Logic (Ramus).

In Dartmouth College, for the session of 1811, the following courses were offered:

Freshmen—Latin and Greek classics; arithmetic; English grammar; rhetoric.

Sophomore—Latin and Greek classics; logic; geography; arithmetic; geometry; trigonometry; algebra; conic sections; surveying; belles-lettres; criticism.

Junior—Latin and Greek classics; geometry; natural and moral philosophy; astronomy.

Senior—Metaphysics; theology; natural and political law.

The following courses were offered at Harvard for the session of 1825:

Freshmen—Livy, five books; plane geometry; Graeca Majora; Horace, algebra; English grammar.

Sophomore—Solid geometry; English history; Cicero; analytic geometry; rhetoric.

Junior—Logic; moral philosophy; chemistry; Tacitus; Homer; calculus; mechanics; electricity.

Senior—Intellectual philosophy; astronomy; Butler's analogy; political economy; chemistry; natural philosophy.

By comparing even the latest and most advanced of these courses of study, one will see that the best high schools of the present day are nearly the equivalent of the institutions from which Washington could have drawn his ideals, and that a university that now begins where the best colleges of his time left off, would surely be the equal of all that he could have hoped to see in his national university. Such institutions we now have in every state and in almost every city.

During the early years of our national existence it might have been possible to bring into one institution the greater part of the