A few days ago, a Master of Arts, who is still a young man, and therefore the recipient of a modern education, stated to me that until he had reached the age of twenty years he had never been taught anything whatever regarding natural phenomena, or natural law. Twelve years of his life previously had been spent exclusively among the ancients. The case, I regret to say, is typical. Now, we cannot, without prejudice to humanity, separate the present from the past. The nineteenth century strikes its roots into the centuries gone by, and draws nutriment from them. The world cannot afford to lose the record of any great deed or utterance; for such are prolific throughout all time. We cannot yield the companionship of our loftier brothers of antiquity,--of our Socrates and Cato,--whose lives provoke us to sympathetic greatness across the interval of two thousand years. As long as the ancient languages are the means of access to the ancient mind, they must ever be of priceless value to humanity; but surely these avenues might be kept open without making such sacrifices as that above referred to, universal. We have conquered and possessed ourselves of continents of land, concerning which antiquity knew nothing; and if new continents of thought reveal themselves to the exploring human spirit, shall we not possess them also? In these latter days, the study of Physics has given us glimpses of the methods of Nature which were quite hidden from the ancients, and we should be false to the trust committed to us, if we were to sacrifice the hopes and aspirations of the Present out of deference to the Past. The bias of my own education probably manifests itself in a desire I always feel to seize upon every possible opportunity of checking my assumptions and conclusions by experience. In the present case, it is true, your own consciousness might be appealed to in proof of the tendency of the human mind to inquire into the phenomena presented to it by the senses; but I trust you will excuse me if, instead of doing this, I take advantage of the facts which have fallen in my way through life, referring to your judgment to decide whether such facts are truly representative and general, and not merely individual and local.