confinement of a school-room. The field of geologic facts is so varied that the child's mind discovers the needed variety. It discovers for itself, and gains that peculiar delight which accompanies all discovery of new truth. This is better than consignment to penal servitude on a hard bench. This testimony will be found unanimous.

Next, the doctrines of geology are chiefly the generalizations induced from the facts observed. Some of the doctrines are

these: The age of the world is very great. The action of terrestrial forces has been the same in nature in all the world's history. All the lands have lain under the sea. The stratified rocks are formed from sea-sediments. The earliest forms of life were simple in organization. A gradual advance in the rank of the earth's inhabitants has accompanied the progress of the earth's preparation. The history of the world has been a history of cooling. Such generalizations are induced from the facts of observation. The child does little at inductive reasoning, but he begins, and he does more with advance of years, and more under the suggestions of the facts. Geology, like the other inductive sciences, brings training to the inductive faculties. These are pre-eminently the faculties of modern science, which has created modern civilization. A citizen is not broadly and liberally educated until he has prepared himself to appreciate the nature of the forces of that civilization which nourishes him, and also to take part in its activities. Few early studies in the conventional literary or linguistic curriculum stimulate to any extent the inductive powers. As pursued in early life, Latin and Greek supply no training for these powHistory, geography, and arithmetic afford none. Unless the boy takes up geology or some of the kindred studies, he goes through the first ten years of schooling without any of that training which modern life demands. The schools do not fit him, in culture or knowledge, to participate in the characteristic activities of the age. They who conduct those activities have been fitted without thanks to the schools.

ers.

While thus the acquisition of the facts trains the observing powers and the sense-memory, the principles induced from them train the inductive powers and the thought-memory, and the mental pictures by which the inductive truth is rendered clear and vivid afford a training for the imagination. These results

must be fully weighed, though the words which embody them are few. None of these results come from linguistic and literary study.

Geology and, to some extent, the other inductive sciences go much further. The great induced principles of the science serve as starting-points for processes of a deductive character. In geology, for example, all we know or believe in reference. to future vicissitudes of the world is known through deduction as strict as that which fixes the fact and the date of an eclipse. It is by deduction from the inductive principle of a cooling world that we are able to reason back to primordial conditions; to trace them out in their historic development; to detect in those conditions the common data of all world-life, and thus to rise to the grand conception of the unity of the world's career; the unity of all world-life; the unity of the empire of nature; the unity of the histories past with the unenacted histories future-and thus the unity of the power and wisdom which govern in all time and all space. The activity of the mind in such reasonings is of the kind which mathematics and logic awaken. The power of unfolding a principle in the details of fact which it involves is a high and a noble power, and confers majesty and weight upon intelligence. But for such mental training languages and literatures afford no facilities in early education. The reflective pursuit of these forms of learning is collegiate and post-collegiate.

Collaterally, such pursuit of trains of deductive reflection diciplines the thought-memory; and the effort to grasp deductive results and apprehend them with vividness calls for the noblest and boldest picturing power of the imagination.

Thus, in its successive stages and departments, the study of geology elicits every mental power into earnest exercise; and the order of its demands coincides with the order of development of the faculties. It is therefore a means of complete and symmetrical culture. I insist upon this conclusion. Do the languages and literatures afford training for the whole range of faculties? No person will affirm it. I also insist upon this conclusion. Viewed, then, as means of intellectual culture the natural sciences possess indisputable pre-eminence.

But we must view the sciences also as a means of ethical culture. The ethical influence is direct, incidental, and reflex.

No person of broad intelligence and warm imagination can follow the trains of deductive thought which I have indicated without receiving a profound moral impression. The native intuitions of the mind stand ready ever to interpret the conceptions which deduction unfolds and imagination depicts. Unity throughout space; unity through all time-past and present; unity of plan, purpose; vastness which by an intuitive illation becomes infinity; intelligence as the correlative of plan; boundless, infinite intelligence, and co-ordinated powerGod before all, in all, changeless and infinite-this is the climax of the unuttered but impressive reasonings signaled in the soul, as thought sweeps over the grand conceptions reasoned out by science. These are ends not attained within the narrow limits of truth humanly and finitely originated. These are only the fruitage of the study of God's activities, not man's. These are the rewards of science, not of literature.

Incidentally, the absorbing interest of scientific pursuits displaces the desire for ignoble gratifications. The boy who has become fascinated with the pursuit of nature's realities experiences ever new delight in air and sunlight and exercise; in the incessant observation of something new; and in the inference which comes to his intelligence with all the freshness and stimulus of a discovery. All these concomitants of scientific study inspire enthusiasm, devotion, and exclude the desire for those gratifications gained by loitering about street-corners, and listening to the depraved gossip of those who have not learned to put mind into their enjoyments. This form of ethical resultgood by displacement of evil-does not belong to science as such; it belongs to every absorbing mental occupation. But the point which I make is, the great superiority of the natural sciences, especially as pursued in the open air, in the inspiration of that interest and enthusiasm which insure virtue by exclusion of the temptations to vice-the higher motive becoming strong enough to supersede the lower one.

Reflexively, the ethical influence of scientific discipline is seen in the scientific spirit begotten and the scientific habit of mind established. There may be people who imagine such a result would render life prosy and mechanical. What is the scientific spirit? It is the spirit which characterizes the suc cessful pursuit of the modern sciences out of which our modern

civilization has grown. It is the sincere love of truth. It is willing to renounce any error, however venerable; to dispel any illusion, however fascinating; to reverse any belief, when proven wrong; to decide against a friend, in the interest of truth; to sacrifice even a self-interest, if grounded only in misapprehension or error. It searches for the truth with patience, with assiduity, with long watching and unwearying caution. Its facts it seeks to verify by closest scrutiny; its inferences it seeks to validate by untiring repetitions. Never so firmly intrenched in an opinion as to become apathetic to new evidence, it cannot be persecuted from a belief sanctioned by honest proof. Humble as a child and firm as a rock, a whisper of evidence startles attention, a word impresses belief, but a storm of public disapproval is borne as calmly and as sternly as Mont Blanc faces the storm which whitens its summit.

Can it be imagined that supreme devotion to truth is not a high moral quality? Is the scientific spirit not one to be cultivated? Can it be acquired by activity of mind on themes outside of the scientific field? Does Latin grammar cultivate the love of truth and reality, in distinction from shams and surmises?

The usefulness of scientific education-lowest in esteem of one school of pedagogical philosophers, highest in that of another school, as well as that also of the great public, holds, in an eclectic view, a position collateral with its agency for culture. The value of the applications of science in our civilization, too vast and varied to be argued here, may be considered adequately proven by the numerous and costly enterprises in engineering, in architecture, in mining, in geological surveys undertaken at public as well as private cost. Every public geological survey is a verdict of statemanship in support of the claim which I here make.

On these four broad grounds-best for bodily training, best for intellectual culture, best for ethical culture, and best for supplying useful knowledge-we must place the natural sciences far above literature and dead languages in supplying the young learner with an education such as symmetrical manhood and American citizenship pre-eminently demand.

Alexander Winchelle

THE ELECTIVE ELEMENT IN THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM.

The degree of Bachelor of Arts stands for the highest form of education given by the colleges in regular courses of study. It represents three or four years of special preparatory training followed by four years of collegiate work. For centuries the colleges have steadily adhered to the classical languages, mathematics, history, philosophy, and the natural sciences as the basis of this honor. Other courses are offered for other degrees ap proaching more or less closely to the classical, but never equaling it in public estimation, and always implying special rather than liberal culture.

But with the vast increase of knowledge in these later times, the innumerable lines of special work pursued, and the endless forms of applied science, there has appeared a strong and persistent expression of desire that the entire theory of collegiate training should be modified and the curricula materially changed. What answer have our colleges and universities made so far? and what further should and will they make in the near future? The college is a feature and factor of civilization reciprocally acting and being acted upon by surrounding conditions. It first came into being as a substitute for monastic schools because the conditions of society demanded liberal education for laymen as well as for the clergy. Merton College-the oldest of Oxford-was established in 1264, "in order to produce a constant succession of scholars devoted to the pursuits of literature," bound to employ themselves in the study of arts or philosophy, theology, or the canon law; the majority to continue in the arts and philosophy until passed on to the study of theology by the decision of the Wardens and Fellows, and as the result of meritorious proficiency in the first named subjects." This college, the product of the demand of the times, gave England many of her most eminent men during the first hundred years of its history. From that day to this the colleges have met, with more or less promptness, the needs of their times.

In answer to the demand for a wider range of studies the clective element has appeared in varying degrees in nearly all our college courses. Harvard leads the movement by making elective within prescribed limits. She

almost every thing