"so famous, So excellent in art, and still so rising."
One of the most marked features of the advance that has lately been made is the full recognition of the Natural Sciences as forming an essential part of the scheme of University studies. For centuries there had been an "intellectual onesidedness" at Oxford. It had chiefly cultivated classic learning. But it has now undertaken to repair the deficiency that existed in this respect, and, while still retaining all its classic studies, it has added to them a full course of training in the knowledge of Nature. "Our object is," says Dr. Acland, speaking as one of the professors of the University, "our object is,--first, to give the learner a general view of the planet on which he lives, of its constituent parts, and of the relation which it occupies as a world among worlds; and secondly, to enable him to study, in the most complete scientific manner, and for any purpose, any detailed portion which his powers qualify him to grasp."
Such an object brings the University into full sympathy with the present tendencies of education in our own country. With us, scientific pursuits and the study of Nature are receiving greater and greater attention and engrossing a continually larger share of the interest, the time, and the talent of students. There already exists, and there is danger of its increase, in many of our best institutions of learning, and many of our most educated men, an intellectual onesidedness of a contrary, but not less unfortunate character, to that which long existed at Oxford. The temper of our people, the wide field for their energies, the development of the so-called practical traits of character under the stimulus of our political and social institutions, the solitary dissociation of America from the history and the achievements of the Old World, the melancholy absence of monuments of past greatness and worth,--these and many other circumstances peculiar to our position all serve to weaken the general interest in what are called classical studies, and to direct the attention of the most ambitious and active minds far too exclusively to the pursuits of science. And when to these circumstances peculiar to ourselves is added the influence of those general causes which have had the effect of leading men throughout the civilized world to give of late years more and more of thought and study to the investigation of Nature and to the pursuits resulting therefrom, it is not strange that learning, so-called, should, for the present at least, find itself but poorly off in America, and that the essential value of learned studies for an even and fair development of the intellectual faculties should be far too little regarded. The danger that arises from a too exclusive devotion to scientific pursuits is pointed out by Dr. Acland in a passage which deserves thoughtful consideration, coming as it does from a man distinguished not more for scientific eminence than for his wide and cultivated intellect.