Moral and social science--one of the greatest and most fruitful of our
future classes, I hope--at present lacks only one thing in our
programme, and that is a teacher. A considerable want, no doubt; but it
must be recollected that it is much better to want a teacher than to
want the desire to learn.
Further, we need what, for want of a better name, I must call Physical
Geography. What I mean is that which the Germans call "_Erdkunde_." It
is a description of the earth, of its place and relation to other
bodies; of its general structure and of its great features--winds,
tides, mountains, plains: of the chief forms of the vegetable and
animal worlds, of the varieties of man. It is the peg upon which the
greatest quantity of useful and entertaining scientific information can
be suspended.[5]
Literature is not upon the college programme; but I hope some day to see
it there. For literature is the greatest of all sources of refined
pleasure, and one of the great uses of a liberal education is to enable
us to enjoy that pleasure. There is scope enough for the purposes of
liberal education in the study of the rich treasures of our own language
alone. All that is needed is direction, and the cultivation of a refined
taste by attention to sound criticism. But there is no reason why French
and German should not be mastered sufficiently to read what is worth
reading in those languages with pleasure and with profit.
And finally, by-and-by, we must have history; treated not as a
succession of battles and dynasties; not as a series of biographies; not
as evidence that Providence has always been on the side of either Whigs
or Tories, but as the development of man in times past and in other
conditions than our own.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Professor Huxley's "Physiography," published by D. Appleton & Co.,
New York, is an excellent text-book for the study he here recommends. It
has been drawn upon for two chapters of the first volume of
"Masterpieces of Science." Equally to be recommended are "Physical
Geography" and "Elementary Physical Geography," by Prof. W. M. Davis, of
Harvard University, published by Ginn & Co., Boston.
SCIENCE AND CULTURE
PROFESSOR T. H. HUXLEY
[Sir Josiah Mason's Science College, Birmingham, was opened
in 1880 with an address by Professor Huxley which appears in
full in the third volume of his essays published by D.
Appleton & Co., New York. As here given passages of local and
temporary interest have been omitted.]
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