[Footnote 9: See Address on "Ideal Education of the Masses."]
The proof for us here in America, close at { 143} hand, that these universities of the Middle Ages were thoroughly scientific in spirit and not only capable of, but actually active and successful in scientific investigation, is to be found in our earliest American universities. We are prone to think, because of the curiously defective way in which our histories of education have been written, that the only things worth while talking about in the origins of education here in America are to be found in English America. Recent investigations have shown how utterly deceived we were by foolish self-conceit in this matter. Long before the English-American universities were founded, and still longer before they began to do any serious work in education, there were important universities having literally thousands of students in attendance in the Spanish-American countries. The University of Mexico and the University of Lima in Peru were both founded about the middle of the sixteenth century. Harvard came nearly a century later, Yale a full century and a half, Princeton more than two centuries. The contrast between our English-American institutions of learning, however, and their Spanish-American rivals in accomplishment and numbers in attendance is still more striking than the mere dates of foundation.
Of course there were chairs of many sciences, strange as that may seem to us with our ridiculous traditions with regard to the history of education. These Spanish-American universities were { 144} the direct descendants of the old mediaeval universities. They were in close relationship with Salamanca, Valladolid and Alcala. They were the progeny of scientific universities and they were, of course, occupied mainly with science. In spite of the fact that already the influence of the Renaissance, with its classical studies as the basis of education, had begun to make itself felt, these Spanish-American universities retained, to a great extent, the scientific curriculum. Nor must it be thought that they were shilly-shally institutions of learning, doing nothing in reality, but making a great pretence of studying many things. To know the very opposite we turn to Bourne, himself at the time a professor at Yale, and writing one of the volumes of a series edited by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, who holds the chair of history at Harvard, to be told in very definite emphatic terms how successfully investigations in science and scientific education were carried on in Mexico. Professor Bourne says: