Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/494

470, facilities, or pecuniary reward. Discouragement of the most wearing kind will, in nine cases out of ten, be his lot.

The American college system, then, is clearly an impediment in the way of American science. It acts adversely in several modes, and these I purpose tracing.

There are to-day in America over five hundred institutions claiming the name of college or university. Of these more than forty are in the single State of Ohio. Some are exclusively for male students, others receive only young ladies, the majority are arranged for the coeducation of the sexes. Every religious sect, or fragment of a sect, is represented: Baptists, Free-will Baptists, Seventh-day Baptists, Presbyterians, United Presbyterians, Cumberland Presbyterians, Episcopalians, both High-Church and Low-Church, Methodists of divers complexions, Adventists, Swedenborgians, Friends, Unitarians, and Universalists: all control special institutions, equipped and endowed with due reference to the perpetuation of sound faith, and, incidentally, to the encouragement of what is supposed to be learning. Among Catholics, who now control seventy-four colleges, the intersectarian character is strongly marked, and institutions are recognized as especially Jesuit, or Franciscan, or Benedictine, or managed by the Christian Brothers, or by the Congregation of the Sacred Heart.

Now, there are several ways by which this sectarianism in education works mischief to science. The very fact that a college has been established for theological purposes, or for ecclesiastical aggrandizement, is adverse to good scientific research. Even though the teacher of science may not be directly hindered, the studies which are of especial value to theological students will be given undue prominence. In fact, nearly every American college emphasizes the classics and literary studies, and looks upon natural science as something of minor importance, often as a dangerous accessory, which must be tolerated, but not encouraged. A college catalogue which now lies open before me, after announcing that full provision has been made in its course for the inculcation of religion and morality, asserts that "scientific culture is of value only in so far as it is based on a true conception of God, and our relation to him." Such a statement as this, viewed from the standpoint of any particular sect, will usually be found to mean more than the mere words indicate.

But the great injury to science is done by the unnecessary subdivision of forces. Forty institutions spring up where only one is needed, and nearly all of them are necessarily weaklings. Libraries, cabinets, apparatus, buildings, and faculties, are foolishly duplicated. Each college lives in a continual struggle for existence, doing inferior work, and paying miserable salaries to an inadequate corps of teachers. If there were such things as Presbyterian mathematics, Baptist chemistry, Episcopalian classics, and Methodist geology, such a scattering of educational forces would be pardonable; but, as matters really