"THE GREEK QUESTION."

3

should be intrusted with the training of those who are to follow them in the same work.

Now, such is the artificial condition of our schools, and so completely are they ruled by prescription, that, when we attempt to lay out a proper course of training for the scientific professions, we are met at the very outset by the Greek question. Greek is a requisition for admission to college, and the only schools in which a scientific training can be had do not teach Greek, and, what is more, can not be expected to teach it.

This brings us to the root of the whole difficulty with which the teachers of natural science have been contending, and which is the cause of the present movement. We can not obtain any proper scientific training from the classical schools, and the present requisitions for admission to college practically exclude students prepared at any others. At Cambridge we have vainly tried to secure some small measure of scientific training in the classical schools: first, by establishing summer courses in practical science especially designed for training teachers, and chiefly resorted to by such persons; and, secondly, by introducing some science requisitions into the admission examinations. But the attempt has been an utter failure. The science requisitions have been simply "crammed," and the result has been worse than useless; because, instead of securing any training in the methods of science, it has in most cases given a distaste for the whole subject. True science-teaching is so utterly foreign to all their methods that the requisitions have merely hampered the classical schools, and the sooner they are abandoned the better. Both the methods and the spirit of literary and scientific culture are so completely at variance that we can not expect them to be successfully united in the same preparatory school.

We look, therefore, to entirely different schools for the two kinds of preparation for the university which modern society demandsschools which, for the want of better distinctive names, we may call classical and scientific schools. In the classical school the aim should be, as it has always been, literary culture, and the end should be that power of clothing thought in words which awakens thought. Of course, the results of natural science must to a certain extent be taught; for even literary men can not afford to be wholly ignorant of the great powers that move the world. But the natural sciences should be studied as useful knowledge, not as a discipline, and such teaching should not be permitted in the least degree to interfere with the serious business of the place. In the scientific school, on the other hand, while language must be taught, it should be taught as a means, not as an end. The educated man of science must command at least French and German-and for the present a limited amount of Latin-—as well as his mother-tongue, because science is cosmopolitan. But these languages should be acquired as tools, and studied no further than they

are essential to the one great end in view, that knowledge which is the essential condition of the power of observing, interpreting, and ruling natural phenomena.

In such a course as this it is obvious that the study of Greek would have no place, even if there were time to devote to it, and we can not alter the appointed span of human life, even out of respect to this most honored and worthy representative of the highest literary culture. Of course, no one will question that the scholar who can command both the literary and the scientific culture will be thereby so much the stronger and more useful man; and certainly let us give every opportunity to the "double firsts" to cultivate all their abilities, and so the more efficiently to benefit the world. But such powers are rare, and the great body of the scientific professions must be made up of men who can only do well the special class of work in which they have been trained; and, if you make certain formal and arbitrary requisitions, like a small amount of Greek, obstacles in the way of their advancement, or of that social recognition to which they feel themselves entitled as educated men, those requisitions must necessarily be slighted, and your policy will give rise to that cry of “fetich" of which recently we have heard so much.

Now, all the schools which prepare students for Harvard College are classical schools. We do not wish to alter these schools in any respect, unless to make them more thorough in their special work. As I have already said, the small amount of study of natural science which we have forced upon them has proved to be a wretched failure, and the sooner this hindrance is got out of their way the better. We do not wish to alter the studies of such schools as the Boston and Roxbury Latin Schools, the Exeter and Andover Academies, the St. Paul's and the St. Mark's Schools, and the other great feeders of the college. No-not in the least degree! We do not ask for any change which in our opinion will diminish the number of those coming to the college with a classical preparation by a single man. We look for our scientific recruits to wholly different and entirely new sources. For, although we think that there are many students now coming to us through the classical schools who would run a better chance of becoming useful men if they were trained from the beginning in a different way, yet such is the social prestige of the old classical schools and of the old classical culture that, whatever new relations might be established, the class of students which alone we now have would, I am confident, all continue to come through the old channels.

This is not a mere opinion; for only a very few men avail themselves of the limited option which we now permit at the entrance examinations—nine, at least, out of ten, offering what is called maximum in classics.

We look, then, for no change in the classical schools. Our only

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.

W

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