Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/325

Rh to history, modern languages, civil policy and general literature;. . ." With this compare President Eliot's 'What is a Liberal Education,' written in 1884; President Eliot names as subjects entitled to full admission into higher culture these five: English literature, French and German, history, political economy and natural science. The first four are practically identical with Bacon's list; and the last, natural science, is abundantly championed by Bacon in discussing what he names as the third and sixth defects of the existing system. What Bacon, as intellectual seer, prescribed, Eliot, as foremost actor in university reform in America at least, confirms and urges. Moreover, the fulfilment of Bacon's word is the more wonderful in that for two centuries after he wrote, almost no movement occurred in the dry bones of the traditional system, and that within the limits the third hundred years the five subjects in question have conquered their rightful place in higher education.

The second defect which Bacon saw in the institutions of his own day is one which will appeal at once to those who even in this better age earn their bread by service in the armies of science and learning—'the mean salaries apportioned to public lectureships, whether in the sciences or the arts.' Even in this matter all must admit that progress has been made since Bacon's time; and all will agree that Bacon was right in pointing to higher compensation of the scientific laborer as one of the indispensable conditions of large and general progress in the work. It is safe to say that the economic condition of the individual worker in these fields is far better to-day than it was in the sixteenth century; and the total sum applied to the advancement of learning, and especially to those very branches that Bacon so much advocated, is immeasurably vaster than ever before in the history of the world, and yearly increasing.

"The next deficiency we shall notice," says Bacon, "is the want of philosophical instruments. . . . To study natural philosophy, physic and many other sciences to advantage, books are not the only essentials—other instruments are required." Bacon goes on to mention what has already been done in this direction—the use of spheres, globes, astrolabes, maps; and the provision of 'gardens for the growth of simples' and dead bodies for dissection, for schools of medicine. But what has been done is entirely inadequate; 'there will be no inroad made into the secrets of nature unless experiments, be they of Vulcan or Daedalus (air ships?), furnace, engine or any other kind, are allowed for;. . . you must allow the spies and intelligencers of nature to bring in their bills, or else you will be ignorant of many things worthy to be known.' With what joy would the writer of this have beheld the laboratories of a modern university; how he would