"It came to a new birth in 1808, and found itself very much where it had been, before this long sleep. Napoleon declared that the new method of the University was very like that of the ancient University of Paris; only that the courses 'left something to desire with regard to drawing, modern languages, geography, history, and especially mathematical and physical sciences.' This was progress, no doubt, and it is well to grant it. But Napoleon is mistaken, when he pretends that the new University is a child of the ancient one. It is preëminently a child of the Jesuits. For, as we have remarked, the Jesuits, at the beginning, took great care to make no innovations. They accepted, as they found them, the old methods, introduced little by little their own mode of procedure, an alteration most calculated to assure their influence and their success. The grand old University which went down to the second rank, so to say, in public education, submitted to the influence of its detested and triumphant rivals, and, in spite of itself, it allowed itself to be permeated by their methods. Hence, in 1808, at the moment when Napoleon dreams that he is reëstablishing the University, the ideal of public instruction was a mixture of the old university traditions and the empiric methods of the Jesuits."[354] It does not come within the scope of this writer to indicate how, from this historical point of divergence, the modern practical method of instruction came to be fully organized. Each system went its own way. I pass on to the other line, or rather back to the Jesuit _Ratio_; and I will merely point out what process of adjustment it then underwent. In 1832, Father Roothaan, General of the Society, addressed an encyclical letter to the Order. To give an abstract of it, he says: "In the very first assembly after the restoration of the Society, a petition had been received from the Provinces, and daily experience since then has shown it to be more and more necessary, that the System of Studies should be accommodated to the exigencies of the times. After a consultation, involving much labor and accurate study, a form of revised _Ratio_ has been drawn up, which is now offered for use and practice, in order that after being amended again if necessary, or else enlarged, it may receive the sanction of a universal law. The undertaking was approached with the greatest reverence for a System which had been approved by two centuries of successful operation, and which had been extolled, not unfrequently, by the very enemies of the Order. "Of the novelties which had been introduced into the method of educating youth, during the last fifty years or more, was it forsooth possible that all could be approved and adopted in our schools? New methods and new forms invented day after day, a new arrangement of matter and of time, often self-contradictory and mutually repugnant--how could all this be taken as a rule for our studies?