Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/380

376 with a very benumbed consciousness, not realizing how little we are understanding. A foreign language rouses our attention, and all the more in proportion to its strangeness. The modern tongues are modern and in part already ours; Greek and Latin, by their strangeness, more pervadingly quicken the attention.

And what becomes of the finger in the dictionary—a very different thing from a glance into a glossarial index—if our language study be English? Conceding that the same diligent attention might gain as good results from the English dictionary, how are we to drive students to give it such use? Driven they must be, for they think they know already. The strangeness of Greek and Latin furnishes the spur, does the driving for us.

VII. Teaching Literature.

What a problem Professor Hill broaches here, literary training! President Woodrow Wilson, on the other hand, thinks that literature may be learned, but that it can not be taught: it certainly seems as if, in Teutonic lands, there is no developed method for teaching literature successfully. Nearly a score of years ago a despairing reviewer in The Athenæum wrote the striking phrase that courses in literature inevitably dwindled into "chatter about Shelly and the Harriet problem." One who like Professor Hill has admitted that "A man who has had a classical education has a craftsman's feeling for literature: he regards it as an artist regards a picture," has answered in advance his objection that "The literary training obtained whilst learning Latin and Greek is indirect, accidental." Granted, but what a splendid by-product—and I believe it to be only a by-product—" a craftsman's feeling for literature."

VIII. On Practical Studies.

There is the utmost haziness in the popular mind as to what studies are "practical." Nine out of ten would put mathematics at the head of the list. Only the simplest arithmetical processes are in general use, however. Only an infinitesimal proportion of those who have studied algebra, plane and analytic geometry, or calculus have ever made use of them. Adding machines and computation tables keep the bulk of the world's commerce straight. But nobody has studied Latin without being or feeling himself surer of his control of a third of the words of his daily speech. I have never thought the etymological a particularly strong argument for studying Latin, but it has been given me by students of my own whom I didn't think I had succeeded in getting to learn Latin. That the close study of an English dictionary might do