Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/564

558 courses in masonry and stone cutting be added to the college curriculum. The plea is not consistent. The Hebrew people and the Hebrew Scriptures have had greater influence upon mankind than that exerted by the Greeks and Romans or their literature, yet no one has demanded that lads be drilled in the accents and paradigms of the Hebrew language. The Greeks owed their civilization to Egypt and Babylonia, yet no one has wept because the study of hieroglyphics and cuneiform is not a prominent feature in the curriculum of secondary schools and colleges. English translations suffice for these languages; it is difficult to conceive why they should not suffice for Greek and Latin.

It is not easy to discover grounds justifying diatribes against the changed attitude toward Latin and Greek as college studies. When one challenges the correctness of the classicist's position, the good man seems to be shocked by the questioner's audacity, he wanders amid generalities and usually finds relief in gloomy reflections respecting this utilitarian age. But the classicist forgets or does not know that, until very recent times, the study of Latin and Greek had nothing whatever to do with mental training, was not supposed to have any special value in that connection. It was as purely utilitarian as the study of bookkeeping in a commercial school, the erection of an anvil in a blacksmith's shop or the purchase of a ticket before entering the train. The would-be student learned Latin just as he learned to read—that the road to knowledge or to preferment might be open to him. In the old universities lectures and text-books were in Latin; many of the Christian Fathers wrote in Greek and would-be theologians needed that language. The university was closed to the man ignorant of Latin as an American college is closed to the man ignorant of English. It was for this reason that when colleges were founded in this land, the chief emphasis was given to the classic tongues; they were established merely as schools preparatory to the university work of theological seminaries, whose text-books were in Latin and Greek.

But the Roman church lost control of the intellectual world; Latin ceased to be the universal language of scholars; lectures and text-books were given in the vernacular. Even theological seminaries, outside of the Roman church, discarded the old text-books and replaced them with modern works of less polemic spirit. Seventy-five years ago all excuse for keeping Latin and Greek in the college curriculum had disappeared. Those languages had held their place because of utility and that had disappeared. But the colleges were here, the largest of them very small; their curriculum was a survival of the past, no longer useful, it was barely ornamental. A new era had been opened by the study of science, but those who controlled the colleges knew nothing of science and most of them thought of it only as an invention of the devil—a new way of