Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/326

322 have glowed with enthusiasm over experiment stations and a Carnegie Institution!

The fourth point is more distinctly educational: 'neglect of proper supervision or diligent inquiry into the course of studies, with a view to a thorough reformation of such parts as are ill-suited to the age, or of unwise institution.' Bacon gives two specimens of faults in the existing course of study: first, that scholars are inducted too early into logic and rhetoric; and second, that invention and memory are not exercised together. These are evidently mentioned rather to indicate the kind of reforms which Bacon here intends, than for any peculiar importance attaching to them. Perhaps nothing is more characteristic of modern education than just this 'diligent inquiry into the course of study' which Bacon recommends; not indeed that we may yet count ourselves to have attained to perfection in the matter of actual reformation, nor to have yet cast off all that was fit only for the 'obscure times' in which our curricula were first formed. But throughout the civilized world those responsible for the training of the young—teachers, parents and statesmen—are giving themselves with resolute purpose to the discovery and ordering of the best means of education, for all ages from infancy to maturity.

The next defect is 'the little sympathy and correspondence which exists between colleges and universities, as well throughout Europe as in the same state and kingdom.' Evidently the possession of a common academic language did not insure complete academic harmony and -cooperation! One can not doubt that Bacon would have seen many fulfilments of this desire of his in modern university life: learned ^societies, associations of colleges and schools, conferences, philosophical ; and scientific journals, scientific congresses at international expositions, and the like. Perhaps the ceremonies of inducting a president of a university into his office would have seemed to him particularly to show forth' a fraternity of learning and illumination, relating to that paternity which is attributed to God, who is called the Father of lights.' "Lastly," says Bacon, "I may lament that no fit men have been engaged to forward those sciences which yet remain in an unfinished state." Lastly, indeed, but not least; rather may we believe that this forwarding of the unfinished sciences lay nearest of all to the heart of the author of the Instauration Magna, a work undertaken, he tells us, to 'perform, as it were, a lustrum of the sciences, and to take account of what have been prosecuted and what omitted.' None of Bacon's admonitions have been more fully heeded by the universities most worthy of the name; indeed it has come to be a mark of a genuine university that its teachers should be all 'fit men to forward the unfinished sciences'—in other words, investigators. How vast has been the actual progress in the lustrum of the sciences may perhaps best