For this reason we hold the objection to be valueless, that men will desert their Greek and Latin, their logic and mathematics, for the subjects of the New Schools and Triposes. The provisions of the Cambridge graces rebut this presumption. When Oxford shall proceed with the experiment, she will evidently adopt similar precautions. Mathematical and classical honors preclude the contingency which is apprehended. The genius loci forbids it. The old place will still foster the old studies. But to those studies -whether partially or completely pursued scholars, for the future, are promised opportunities and encouragement for adding a combination of such fixed and progressive sciences as modern history, natural and moral philosophy, jurisprudence, and political economy. Euclid and mechanics at one university, and logic at the other, may still be the principal basis of education. That which attracts is to be appended to, and not substituted for, that which we are supposing, in the cases in question, to repeal. If there is any good remaining in these old foundations of learning (and we admit there is the greatest, and should protest most vehemently against their being refused their due consideration) it is next to impossible that any University disciples of the new learning should be tempted to overlook them; while the barrenness of the ancient tree will be relieved by the fertility of the modern branches. Men of the world will recognize in their material fruits a value which they never would concede to the profoundest abstractions or the most beautiful literature of the schools; and scholars will become convinced that it is possible to know Greek and mathematics, and at the same time know something more. The time has come, when an ordinary Oxford scholar, in addition to his Aldrich and Greek Testament, must have some opportunity of learning accurately the import of those mystic terms pump," "lever,' "pulleys," "galvanism,' "galvanism," &c. &c.; or of that strange language which deals in the 66 will always be a residuum, whom no improvements in academical education can ever reach. These parties might, however, in many cases, obtain considerable benefit from a limited residence at the university, though they could have no title to the distinction, which ought to be implied in its degrees. But that they should have a chance of obtaining the collateral benefits we are thinking of, other reforms than those of the lecture-room are indispensably necessary: reforms in the discipline of the universities, and above all, (though of course they are closely connected,) reforms in the expense. 99.66 symbols "rent," "value," "exchangeable value," "labor," « currency, taxes ;" and a wrangler or a chancellor's medallist will have no excuse for asking as we have heard medallists, wranglers, and fellows of Trinity ask-"Had the treaty of Utrecht any thing to do with the peace of Westphalia ?" or, "Was not the Irish Pale' in Ulster ?" The scholar who has shown a familiarity with the "Ecclesiazuse" of Aristophanes will be induced to extend his acquaintance to the "Femmes Savantes" of Molière; and the time which has been devoted to the "De Officiis" and the "De Oratore" will yield an ampler return than a knack of turning periods or remembering idioms, when the student has been encouraged to follow up these treatises by examining the works of Gaius and the pandects of Justinian. Thus, on the existing basis of classical learning may be laid the structure of a legal discipline-a discipline which, reposing, not as it does now, upon the fragmentary and fortuitous scrapings of a pleader's chambers or an attorney's office, but on the universal principles of moral law may, in time, emancipate the profession of English jurisprudence from the obloquy of an illiberal empiricism, and the imputation of a crude technology. Had our lawyers always laid the foundation of their learning in the comprehensive studies of an enlightened university-had they been taught there not the microscopic details of practice and technicality, but the axioms and the theorems of that noble code, which, originally derived from the moral sense of a great legislative race, has permeated and inspired the common law of England and the statute-book of every civilized nation in the world—we might have had more luminaries on the Bench as illustrious as Holt and Mansfield, and have been spared the reproaches which have been not unjustly heaped on the prolix captiousness of English practitioners. Such reproaches are soon, we trust, about to be washed away. At any rate-whatever be the legal or physical studies partially admitted, if we must not say welcomed, on the Isis-we hope that an Oxford classman will not much longer have just cause for repiningas "a Country Schoolmaster" does-when he contrasts the standard of his university examination with that of the training college at Battersea.* The innovation may find We certainly share the "Country Schoolmaster's" admiration of the examination papers set in this institution. Comprising, as they do, questions in the elementary points of geometry, arithmetic, algebra, geography, church history, favor with some who would have otherwise | thing to do. discouraged it, when we remind them of the opinion expressed some years ago by so distinguished a scholar and philosopher as Sir J. Herschel. It is contained in a letter addressed to the Rev. Dr. Adamson, asking for his advice upon the course he should recommend in the case of one of our foreign settlements. The recommendation in the last sentence of the quotation is well worthy of adoption now. Mr. Cameron has adopted it in India. "A good practical system of public education ought, in my opinion, to be more real than forinal; I mean, should convey much of the positive knowledge, with as little attention to mere systems and conventional forms, as is consistent with avoiding solecisms. This principle, carried into detail, would allow much less weight to the study of languages, especially of dead languages, than is usually considered its due in our great public schools; where, in fact, the acquisition of the latter seems to be regarded as the one and only object of education. While, on the other hand, it would attach great importance to all those branches of practical and theoretical knowledge, whose possession goes to constitute an idea of a well-informed gentleman; as, for example, a knowledge of the nature and constitution of the world we inhabit-its animal, vegetable, and mineral productions, and their uses and properties, as subservient to human wants. Its relation to the system of the universe, and its natural and political subdivisions; and last, and most important of all, the nature and propensities of man himself, as developed in the history of nations and the biography of individuals; the constitutions of human society, including our responsibilities to individuals and to the social body of which we are members. In a word, as extensive a knowledge as can be grasped and conveyed in an elementary course of the actua! system and laws of nature, both physical and moral. "Again, in a country where free institutions prevail, and where public opinion is of consequence, every man is, to a certain extent, a legislator; and for this his education (especially when the government of the country lends its aid and sanction to it) ought at least so far to prepare him, as to place him on his guard against those obvious and popular fallacies which lie across the threshold of this, as well as of every other subject with which human reason has any Scripture history, English history, and agricultural chemistry, we doubt whether one half τῶν πολλῶν at Oxford or Cambridge could answer them creditably off-hand. The "Country Schoolmaster" is a zealous Oxonian; and complains bitterly, that in the course of many years he has not been able to provide himself from Oxford with an assistant competent to instruct his boys in the elements of natural science. Every man is called upon to obey the laws, and therefore it cannot be deemed superfluous that some portion of every man's education should consist in informing him what they are. On these grounds, it would seem to me that some knowledge of the principles of political economy-of jurisprudence of trade and manufactures is essentially involved in the notion of a sound education. A moderate acquaintance also with certain of the useful arts, such as practical mechanics or engineeringin every station of life; while in a commercial agriculture-draftmanship-is of obvious utility country, the only remedy for that proverbial short-sightedness to their best ultimate interest, which is the misfortune rather than the fault of every mercantile community on earth, seems to be, to inculcate as a part of education, those broad principles of free interchange and reciprocal profit and public justice, on which the whole edifice of permanently successful enterprise must be based. "The exercise and development of our reasoning faculties is another grand object of education; and is usually considered, in a certain sense justly, as most likely to be attained by a judicions course of mathematical instruction; while it stands, if not opposed to, at least in no natural connection with, the formal and conventional departments of knowledge, (such as grammar and the so-called Aristotelian logic.) It must be recollected, however, that there are minds which, though not devoid of reasoning powers, yet manifest a decided inaptitude for mathematical studies, which are estimative, not calculating, and which are more impressed by analogies, and by apparent preponderance of general evidence in argument, than by mathematical demonstration, where all the argument is on one side, and no show of reason can be exhibited on the other. The mathematician listens only to one side of a question, for this plain reason, that no strictly mathematical question has more than one side capable of being maintained otherwise than by simple assertion; while all the great questions which arise in busy life and agitate the world, are stoutly disputed, and often with a show of reason on both sides, which leaves the shrewdest at a loss for a decision. This, or something like it, has often been urged by those who contend against what they consider an undue extension of mathematical studies in our Universities. But those who have urged the objection, have stopped short of the remedy. It is essential, however, to fill this enormous blank in every course of education which has hitherto been acted on, by a due provision of some course of study and instruction which shall meet the difficulty, by showing how valid propositions are to be drawn, not from premises which virtually contain them in their very words, as in the case with abstract propositions in mathematics, nor from the juxtaposition of other propositions assumed as true, as in the Aristotelian logic, but from the broad consideration of an assemblage of facts and circumstances brought under review. This is the scope of the inductive philosophy-applicable, and To those who still fondly look back upon which ought to be applied (though it never yet the University examinations of the last has fairly been so) to all the complex circum- century as the model and standard of what stances of human life; to politics, to morals, and an academical diploma should imply, we legislation; to the guidance of individual conduct, and that of nations. I cannot too strongly would suggest the following considerations: The studies of the last century, as recommend this to the consideration of those who are now to decide on the normal course of far as they were a divergence from an older instruction to be adopted in your College. Let scheme-a scheme probably well adapted to them have the glory-for glory it will really be its own times-were a divergence due rather to have given a new impulse to public instructo indolence and indifference than to any tion, by placing the Novum Organum for the first well-constituted design. Producing, as they time in the hands of young men educating for active life, as a text book, and a regular part of undoubtedly did, many men of high attaintheir College course. It is strong meat, I admit, ments, and some of varied learning, they but it is manly nutriment; and though imper- forced upon the majority an involuntary and fectly comprehended, (as it must be at that age reckless idleness. Cambridge, in its characwhen the College course terminates,) the glimps-ter of a University, encouraged no study es caught of its meaning, under a due course of collateral explanation, will fructify in after life; and, like the royal food with which the young bee is fed, will dilate the frame and transform the whole habit and economy. Of course, it should be made the highest book for the most ad vanced classes." We have spoken of the University reform now in progress, as an innovation. But we beg to remind our conservative academicians that it is more strictly a return to an old, than the introduction of a new principle. At least, it is but a performance of the old promise of the Universities. The first two lines of the Cambridge Calendar inform us that "The University of Cambridge is a society of students in all and every of the liberal arts and sciences." Even if we accept the contracted definition which, in the fourteenth century, was given to "arts," we must also bear in mind that arts were even then held to be auxiliary and preparatory to the other faculties. To this day the original faculties exist distinct from that of arts. A corps of twenty-five professors is now in force to represent, besides Greek, Hebrew, and Mathematics, the archaic elements of academical teaching, law, physic, and theology; together with those adoptions of a later age and new necessities, history, geology, mineralogy, and political economy. As it is at present constituted, the scope and pretension of the University really is to "instruct in all liberal arts and sciences." All that was required to perfect this design, was development and academic enforcement. The material and outline already existed; to mould them to use, and shape, and beauty, demanded only arrangement, cohesion, and completion. Given professors, schools, lectures, there remained to be added examinations, prizes, and academical emoluments. Of course but mathematics, and did this expressly The education of the upper classes is strikingly improved within the last twenty years miraculously within the last half century. This has been partly brought about by the action of the old Universities themselves; partly, and more than is generally acknowledged, by some of the public schools; partly also by rival and ambitious institutions, like the London and Durham Universities; partly, and perhaps chiefly, by the impossibility of standing any longer still, in the midst of an advancing world. The basis of instruction was already laid with sufficient breadth and solidity. The evil is, that it is, or rather was, nothing but basis. Men were treated as if they were schoolboys, and so treated long after the age of boyhood had gone by. The objects and subjects of a life into which they were necessarily about to enter, were kept studiously from their ken and contemplation. Destined to jostle and contend in a society which perpetually throws up rough antagonists with more or less of intellect and information, and with every degree of presumption, assurance, and ambition, the University man, braced though he might be by the "iron discipline of an inflexible geometry," or imbued with the most exquisite appreciation of Greek or Roman philosophy, found himself, at the age of twentytwo or twenty-three, so completely at sea in all matters of progressive interest-so unlettered in all the antecedent history of any great social question-that he shrank in despair from a contest in which the vigor of his mind, had it been also enriched with practical and useful knowledge, must have insured him a victory over the petulance of conceit and the flippancy of agitation. Henceforward, let us hope the Cambridge, and soon we trust also the Oxford, graduate will be in some measure qualified by his college career to enter on the functions of his "faculty;" to contend successfully with ignorance and presumption; to disabuse prejudice, to refute error, and to illuminate the darkest dens of bigotry with a torch lighted at the altars of science and humanity. Henceforward, let us hope, England will owe to her splendid and time-honored institutions, a long race, not only of scholars, divines, and mathematicians, but also of chemists and geologists, jurists and political economists. In conclusion, we beg to express our gratitude that no honor in mathematics or classics has been made a condition precedent to competition for the honors in the new Cambridge triposes.* Any qualification of * Formerly the requisites for a Junior Optime (the mathematical degree necessary to qualify a candidate for the Classical Tripos) were indefinite and fortuitous. They are now defined; but embracing, as they do, Dynamics and portions of the Differential and Integral Calculus, they may be considered too high a standard for the minimum of that kind would have defeated what we consider the great advantage of this part of the design. And now that the "pol" examination has been so much enlarged in compass and improved in quality, we would ask of the University of Cambridge why it should insist on enforcing such a condition as a Junior Optime's degree for classical honors? What can ever be the good of making a score of men, who have no aptitude for mathematical studies, cram a medley of propositions from Newton, Conic Sections, and, stranger still, Differential Calculus? It is no disciplining of the mind, but sheer, undiluted, unconcealed cram. There is no disguising the fact; for, it is a matter of notoriety and shame. Surely, the knowledge of Euclid, plane trigonometry, and elementary mechanics, now exacted from the "pol," ought to be considered a sufficiently rigorous "mental preparation" for the lighter amusements of translating Thucydides and Aristotle. It now remains with the University of Cambridge to carry out in honesty and good faith, the principle of instructional reform. That those who have given the impulse in either University, will do their best to direct and perpetuate it, we do not doubt; and to them, admonition at our hands would be impertinent and vain. We would, however, deferentially submit to their consideration, in the first place, the impropriety of harassing the neophytes of the new triposes with manifold and vexatious University examinations. Whatever preparatory examinations are thought necessary, in order to secure a certain progress, had best be left, we think, with each college over its own members, and with each professor in his own department. In the second place, the University must remember that the success of the new system will mainly depend on their encouraging, by prizes and fellowships, the students who distinguish themselves under it. It would be a very great advantage, were government to invite them to recommend to its notice, as is done in Prussia and France, those whose accomplishments and talents seem to qualify them eminently for a civil career, or for the tranquil cultivation of science. Lastly, we would beg them to consider a suggestion which emanated from the learned mathematical honors. Indeed, it is difficult to understand why men who have toiled to make themselves good scholars, should be obliged to swallow five or six mathematical subjects, which, fifty years ago, would have been sufficient to secure a wrangler's degree. Dean of Ely, viz: that the period of residence | previous to an ordinary degree should be curtailed to two years; and that classical and other honors should be contended for at the end of the three years, as now. This arrangement would drop the curtain on that ridiculous farce yclept, "The Little Go." We close our remarks with a cordial offer of our thanks to both Universities-to Oxford for the attempt, to Cambridge for the performance. It is especially to its honor that it did not shrink from the task, or, as has been unwisely thought, the peril of setting the example of an internal reform. Cambridge has done much, before now, to deserve the thanks of England. In the worst ages of bigotry, persecution, and servility in the ages of the fagot, the Star Chamber, and the boot-in the reign of Henry and in the reign of James-she supplied learned and valiant men to plead the cause of freedom in the senate and the forum, or seal it on the scaffold. Her most eminent sons have been the luminaries of the world. The world has seen but one Bacon, one Newton, and one Milton; and Cambridge has the honor of their rearing. Her name, accordingly, is identified with the holiest and grandest trophies won in the cause of human freedom and human knowledge. That she has not at all times been equal to herself, nor in all things consistent with herslf, will be readily forgiven by all who do not resent temporary shortcomings, and are not ungrateful for imperishable services. What she has left undone might be palliated by what she has done well. And in this her latest act she has shown her greatness most especially, in doffing the majesty of a consecrated fame, and the brightness of immemorial traditions, to accoutre herself for the instruction of an age, which has yet to learn that utility is consistent with beauty, action with reflection, and the energy of an industrial epoch with the treasured eloquence of the academy, and the remembered melodies of the Ilvssus! May she prosper as she deserves, and as all her best friends wish! |