Many other vigorous lecturers and writers entered into this reform of the curriculum. Opposition to the over-emphasis of languages, especially the classics, in the content of education was undertaken even earlier in the century by the distinguished phrenologist, George Combe. In his ‘secular’ schools and in his work on _Education_, he emphasized instruction in the sciences relating to moral, religious, social, and political life, as well as those bearing upon man’s physical and mental constitution. After the middle of the century a number of men undertook to popularize the sciences in America by tongue and pen. One of the most effective of these was Edward L. Youmans, who collected and edited a set of lectures urging the claims of the various sciences under the title of _Culture Demanded by Modern Life_ (1867). He also founded the _International Science Series_ (1871) and the _Popular Science Monthly_ (1872). A service for the sciences, bearing more directly upon the educational world, was that performed by Charles W. Eliot (Fig. 54), President of Harvard. This he accomplished largely by an extension of the elective system and an emphasis upon science in the curriculum of school and college. In his description of ‘a liberal education,’ he argues that “the arts built upon chemistry, physics, botany, zoölogy, and geology are chief factors in the civilization of our time, and are growing in material and moral influence at a marvelous rate. They are not simply mechanical or material forces; they are also moral forces of great intensity.” [Sidenote: Huxley parodies the argument of formal discipline.] =The Disciplinary Argument for the Sciences.=--Thus, in general, the writers and lecturers interested in the scientific movement held that a knowledge of nature was indispensable for human welfare and that the content of studies rather than the method was of importance in education. Many of them also expressed their dissent from the disciplinary conception of education urged by the classicists. Huxley, for example, parodies the usual linguistic drill by stating: “I could get up an osteological primer so arid, so pedantic in its terminology, so altogether distasteful to the youthful mind, as to beat the recent famous production of the head-master out of the field in all these excellences. Next, I could exercise my boys upon easy fossils, and bring out all their powers of memory and all their ingenuity in the application of my osteogrammatical rules to the interpretation, or construing, of those fragments.” [Sidenote: But Spencer and others borrow the disciplinary argument of the classicists.]