expectation is to affiliate the college with a wholly different class of schools, which will send us a wholly different class of students, with wholly different aims, and trained according to a wholly different method. At the outset we shall look to the best of our New England high-schools for a limited supply of scientific students, and hope by constant pressure to improve the methods of teaching in these schools, as our literary colleagues have within ten years vastly improved the methods in the classical schools. In time we hope to bring about the establishment of special academies which will do for scienceculture what Exeter and St. Paul's are doing for classical culture. We expect to establish a set of requisitions just as difficult as the classical requisitions-only they will be requisitions which have a different motive, a different spirit, and a different aim; and all we ask is, that they should be regarded as the equivalents of the classical requisitions so far as college standing is concerned. We do not at once expect to draw many students through these new channels. To improve methods of teaching and build up new schools is a work of years. But we have the greatest confidence that in time we shall thus be able to increase very greatly both the clientage and the usefulness of the university.

Is this heresy? Is this revolution? Is it not rather the scientific method seeking to work out the best results in education as elsewhere by careful observation and cautious experimenting, unterrified by authority or superstition? Certainly, the philologist must respect our method; for of all the conquests of natural science none is more remarkable than its conquest of the philologists themselves. They have adopted the scientific methods as well as the scientific spirit of investigation; but, while thus widening and classifying their knowledge, they have rendered the critical study of language more abstruse and more difficult; and this is the chief reason why the time of preparation for our college has been so greatly extended during the last twentyfive years. Nominally, the classical schools cover no more ground than formerly, but they cultivate that ground in a vastly more thorough and scientific way.

These increased requirements of modern literary culture suggest another consideration, which we can barely mention on this occasion. How long will the condition of our new country permit its youths to remain in pupilage until the age of twenty-three or twenty-four; on an average at least three years later than in any of the older countries of the civilized world? It is all very well that every educated man should have a certain acquaintance with what have been called the "humanities." But when your system comes to its present results, and demands of the physician, the chemist, and the engineer-whose birthright is a certain social status, which by accident you temporarily control-that he shall pass fully four years of the training period of his life upon technicalities, which, however important to a literary

man, are worthless in his future calling, is it not plain that your conservatism has become an artificial barrier which the progress of society must sooner or later sweep away? Is it not the part of wisdom, however much pain it may cost, to sacrifice your traditional preferences gracefully when you can direct the impending change, and not to wait until the rush of the stream can not be controlled?

INFLUENCE OF THE ENVIRONMENT ON RELIGION.

WHILE

BY PROFESSOR JAMES T. BIXBY.

HILE religious phenomena are in some respects singularly constant, they are, nevertheless, as noted for their diversity. While certain essential elements are common to almost all faiths, on the other hand, every individual faith has something peculiar to itself. It not only differs in some respects from other religions, but, as we trace down its history, we find it varying from itself.

The Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Kelts, Teutons, and Slavs, are shown by philological research to have come originally from a single stock-the primitive Aryan. Their ancestors originally dwelt together in a common home in the neighborhood of the Caspian Sea; and in this ancient time their religion was, probably, one and the same faith, i. e., in substance. Yet how widely diverse have the faiths of these nations come to be, in the four to five thousand years since that ancient home was little by little deserted! How has this diversity come about? What are the forces or influences that differentiate religions? We may divide them roughly into two kinds : 1. The external variables. 2. The internal variables. In this paper I shall try to sketch the first; i. e., those environing influences about man, about a special race or nation, that tend to produce variation in the course of the development of religion.

1. I would mention the varied influences of outward nature. The diverse phenomena of the world naturally diversify the direction and character of faith. The religious capacities common to all men evolve a stock of religious feeling which lies latent and fluent, as it were, in the soul-like an electric charge in the battery-until some expeperience of the man occurs to elicit its discharge and give it direction. The form and path of faith are determined, in much, by the kind of natural objects with which the spiritual faculty is most closely or impressively brought in contact. Where the spirit of man is frequently confronted with Nature in its power, beauty, or wrath— where sky, sun, mountain, or river, is an important factor in the daily experience and fortune-there arise naturally the corresponding forms of religion-Nature-worship, fetichism, and pantheism. Where, how

ever, it is dreaded and mysterious animate things-the gloo.ny, aweinspiring forest, the venomous serpent, the terrible lion-that most agitate man's heart, there we see, as in Africa, e. g., and among the American aborigines, tree-worship and beast-worship abounding.

There are certain great natural phenomena that are common to all countries, familiar with all tribes and nations, such as sun, moon, stars, earth, rain, wind, etc. These are, therefore, the objects universally divinized. In some countries, where the scenery is very slightly diversified, these few objects, personified over and over again, in varied aspects and under various symbols, seem to constitute the whole pantheon, the whole mythology. It was thus in Egypt, e. g., whose numberless gods represent, after all, but about half a dozen great natural objects. But when we pass out of the level plains of such countries as Egypt and Babylon, to countries where the mountains rise to stupendous and frowning heights, and bowlders and cliffs abound, we have a new class of divinities added to the objects that man worships. The mountaineer, gazing aloft to the white peak, saw, far up, the shining morn strike the cheek of virgin snow, and in his guileless faith it became an abode of the gods; or a deity itself, holding aloft the heavenly dome. If on the soft sandstone of a hill, before petrifaction, bird or beast had left its tracks, then the place, like the Enchanted Mountain of Georgia, was deemed haunted. If the mount, like Kineo, in the north of Maine, happens to have the shape of a moose, then it is reputed to be the queen and progenitor of the moose-tribe turned to stone.

When the barbarian cries out in joy or pain beneath the rocky wall, he hears a mysterious voice answering him back-a voice that belongs to no material creature, and that must, therefore, belong to some divinity or departed spirit. So the sounds that come from caverns, or the roar of the billows on the sea-shore, are thought to be produced by the spirits that have their haunt there; and the kobolds and water-nixies are accordingly added to the lists of the gods popularly believed in. The strange phenomena of volcanoes, or the explosion of confined gases in certain rocks, in their ebullition through springs, would suggest the idea of mighty superhuman beings who lived beneath the earth, and to whose activity the volcano's eruptions were due. The Koniagas think that, when the craters of Alaska send forth fire and smoke, the gods are cooking their food and heating their sweat-houses. So among the Australians, the volcanic rocks found in various places suggest the belief that sulky demons, the igna, have made great fires and thrown out red-hot stones; and the Nicaraguans offered vessels of food and even human victims to Popogatipec, i. e., smoking mountain, to appease her when there was a storm or an earthquake.

Wave and frost are great sculptors of rude images, bearing near enough likeness to man or beast to impress profoundly the imagina

tion of the uncultivated. All along our Northern coasts and in our Western mountains are to be found such figures-like the Stone-face, at the White Mountains; the Bishop Rock, at Campobello, on the Maine coast; and the Master of Life, at the entrance to Lake Superior. So in the North and West of our country there are many erratic bowlders, some oval, or glistening with native copper or mica scales, or balanced on convex prominences so that they readily oscillate. In unenlightened but pious minds, such curious figures naturally inspire veneration and worship as the abodes of spirits, as was the case with the Ojibways, Ottawas, and Dakotas; or they give rise to wild myths of transformation, such as the Indian legends abound in. So, where the rocky and mountainous aspect of nature produces cataracts or dangerous rapids, and the waters roar and toss their white manes in the air, these places-as, e. g., Niagara, the mouth of the Wabash, or the Brear Beaux Falls on the Wisconsin-became to the savage the haunt of spirits or demons, who must be propitiated with offerings of tobacco and meat.

And this mention of tobacco may serve to turn our thoughts to remembrance of the influence of trees and plants in drawing forth religious veneration. Wherever plants are found, like tobacco, or the Peruvian coca, the snake-root, the Indian hemp, the wine of Bacchanal worship, that had a special effect; whether stimulating, narcotic, poisonous, or curative, they were held to possess supernatural power, and were used for various magic rites and became sacred. The soma of the ancient Aryans even became exalted to a place among the gods, and to drink it was the means of gaining immortality. So, likewise, the mysterious whisperings of the wind in ancient forests, or the inexplicable movements of some half-blown-down tree, as the heat of the sun contracted or lengthened its twisted roots, and caused it alternately to rise and fall, have more than once attracted the superstitious awe of the barbarian, and supplied new objects for his adoration.

Thus do the peculiarities of natural objects supply molds in which the metal of religious faith, already lying latent, readily sets. And not only directly, but indirectly, do they shape the forms of faith. The rushing river, e. g., not merely attracts the reverence of the primitive man to itself, but by its swift and treacherous motion, its sinuous course, and snake-like hiss and gleam, it is personified as a mighty divine serpent, and next makes sacred by association the serpents of the country about. The sky, personified by the ancient Egyptian as a heavenly goose, enveloping and hatching the cosmic egg, made sacred henceforth all geese to the pious dwellers by the Nile. In climes like Egypt, where the skies are rainless and the whole aspect of nature equable, almost unchanging, there the gods are marked by calmness of bearing and serenity of nature. We must go to the slopes of the Himalayas or the ridges of the Apennines to find the howling Rudra, with his attendant Maruts, the pounders, rushing wildly through the

glens, or to see the bullocks slain in honor of Jupiter Tonans, the Thunderer. In cold and temperate climes it is the enlivening and warming sun that is loved and adored; but, in the sultry air of the tropics, the sun and the sky of day become evil and destructive deities, and affection is transferred to the refreshing sky of night.

So, also, in their ideas of heaven and hell, there is a natural contrast between the faith of the man of the tropics and the man of the Arctic zone. To the first, the future home of the good is some abode of coolness, some garden of the Hesperides, or a breezy Olympian height, and the place of punishment a place of fire. To the Icelander, hell is the place of cold, worse far to him than fire, and heaven, some comfortable hall surrounded by a hedge of flame. Again, in hot climes, where the soil of the river-bottoms is deep and rich, and nature teems with productiveness, there the gods are credited with the same sensuous nature; religious ideas are apt to revolve about the mysteries of procreation, and the worship of the people is apt to include not a few impure rites and symbols.

The numerous gods of fertility among the agricultural Egyptians —Chem, Min, Chnam, Osiris-the sexual rites of Babylonia, and the numerous objectional symbols in Hindoo worship, illustrate this. On the contrary, under the clear skies and bright moon and the pure streamlets of Greece, it is the virgin goddesses of the most exacting purity, Dianas and Pallas Athenes, rather than loose-zoned and wanton mistresses, that are suggested. Aphrodite and Cybele, and Dionysos indeed, were, later, members of the Olympian court; but they came from regions farther east, where they were tinged with an earthly and sensuous dye, such as we do not find in the native worship of Hellas.

The tribes of Northern Asia, wandering amid the bleak wastes of Mongolia or the gloomy forests of the Ural, their frail shelter shaken by the riotous winds, whose mysterious sighs and howlings often make them quake with terror, come naturally to be believers in dim, mysterious, supernatural powers, with which their own lot is bound up, and readily devote themselves to whatever occult and magic rites the shaman may produce. The Shemite, on the broad plains of Chaldea or the sandy wastes of Arabia, found nothing to arrest his eyes till they rested on the glistening skies, brilliant, in that clear air, with a brilliancy beyond anything that we know: and he became thus, most naturally, a devout star-worshiper; invested the chief celestial objects with the most exalted attributes, and raised them, in his fervid adoration, to more and more absolute majesty and incomparable power, till at length the idea of the divine was exalted into monotheism.

The Aryan, on the contrary, grew up among the mountain pastures of Bactria, where the clouds are often about his feet, and the heavens are not so far away. The earliest Vedic hymns are marked by a sense of the nearness of the gods, and men are seen mingling with them, familiarly, as friends. Nature did not oppress man with dreadful