Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/519

Rh devoted to each of the great branches of science, local institutions, naturalists' clubs, and large popular associations for the advancement of science, as in Germany, France, England, and this country, which hold their meetings in the different cities so as to act upon large numbers of people—all these are illustrations of the tendency to organize for the promotion of science by increasing observations, experiments, and original researches for the improvement and extension of this kind of knowledge. Nor are there many obstacles to these modes of work, save those which spring from its inherent difficulties. It is a very expensive kind of study, involving costly instruments, elaborate investigations, and extensive collections—the sending of expeditions into remote and unknown regions, and of ships around the world to scrape the bottom of the sea. The universally confessed importance of such inquiries has already secured large appropriations for these objects, and it may be expected that in future private enterprise and governmental aid will become still more available for these objects.

But there is another agency for the promotion of science, which we hold to be of far greater importance than all these immediate means and instrumentalities, and which the world has hardly yet begun seriously to consider. We refer to the alliance between science and general education. Science has hitherto accomplished its work with but very imperfect assistance from this source. Education in all its grades has been in the interest of other classes, and it does not even yet distinctly, or fairly, recognize as a class the students of Nature. There have been innumerable institutions strongly endowed, and ably equipped for the intellectual training of lawyers, clergymen, physicians, linguists, metaphysicians, historians, and literary men, but the facilities, for the systematic training of scientific students have been scanty, defective, or altogether wanting. Education was highly organized before science arose, and the old institutions not only did not encourage the experimental study of Nature, but resisted it, with the whole weight of their influence, for centuries. The universities were creatures of the church and the state, and devoted to ideas, and ideals of culture, which were unfavorable for the study of natural things, and obstructive to scientific investigation. The old educational institutions have been, of course, greatly modified and liberalized, in recent times, yet tradition continues in the ascendant, so that, although science has forced its way into many of them, it is still regarded with jealousy and treated as an intruder. Though within the pale of official recognition, it is dealt with as something outside of the venerated curriculum of liberal study. It has not been assimilated so as to become an integral and necessary part of our modern culture, and college authorities are still perplexed to decide how much to concede to it, and what to do with it. Scientific men have, therefore, grown up under unfavorable conditions, and have not had those advantages of early preparation, of cordial encouragement, and of long and faithful discipline, which the students in other departments have freely enjoyed. It is under these grave disadvantages that science has, thus far, advanced. Education has been made only very partially tributary to its progress. When it takes its rightful place in our schemes of study, when it is honored as other acquirements are honored, and when the higher institutions offer the same facilities for prolonged and thorough scientific discipline that they offer for training in classics and mathematics, a step will have been taken toward the general promotion of science, more important in its consequences than any measures that have been hitherto adopted.

And yet this will be but a partial step in the right direction. The