A History of Science — Volume 5Williams, Henry Smith
History
A History of Science — Volume 5
Williams, Henry Smith
Science -- History
This is, in substance, the whole subject of astronomy, as that first
professor must have taught it, even were he the wisest man of his time.
Of the other sciences, except an elementary mathematics, there was
hardly so much as an inkling taught that first class of students. You
will find it appalling, as you muse, to reflect upon the amazing mixture
of utter ignorance and false knowledge which the learned professor of
that day brought to the class-room, and which the "educated" student
carried away along with his degree. The one and the other knew Greek,
Latin, and Bible history and doctrine. Beyond that their minds were
as the minds of babes. Yet no doubt the student who went out from the
University of Jena in the year 1550 thought himself upon the pinnacles
of learning. So he was in his day and age, but could he come to life
to-day, in the full flush of his scholarship, yonder wood-vender, plying
her saw out here in front of the university building, would laugh in
derision at his simplicity and ignorance. So it seems that, after all,
the subjects of John the Magnanimous have changed more than a little
during the three hundred and odd years that John himself, done in
bronze, has been standing out there in the market-place.
THE CAREER OF A ZOOLOGIST
Had one time for it, there would be real interest in noting the steps
by which the mental change in question has been brought about; in
particular to note the share which the successive generations of Jena
professors have taken in the great upward struggle. But we must
not pause for that here. Our real concern, despite the haunting
reminiscences, is not with the Jena of the past, but with the Jena of
to-day; not with ghosts, but with the living personality who has made
the Jena of our generation one of the greatest centres of progress in
human thought in all the world. Jena is Jena to-day not so much because
Guericke and Fichte and Hegel and Schiller and Oken taught here in the
past, as because it has for thirty-eight years been the seat of the
labors of Germany's greatest naturalist, one of the most philosophical
zoologists of any country or any age, Professor Ernst Haeckel. It is of
Professor Haeckel and his work that I chiefly mean to write, and if I
have dwelt somewhat upon Jena itself, it is because this quaint, retired
village has been the theatre of Haeckel's activities all the mature
years of his life, and because the work he has here accomplished could
hardly have been done so well elsewhere; some of it, for reasons I shall
presently mention, could hardly have been done elsewhere at all--at
least in another university.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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