Whitney the opportunity of acquiring a scientific education, the institution would have already repaid, ten thousand times, all that has ever yet been done for its endowment and support.

Colleges then, endowed institutions for liberal education, are indispensable to the welfare of free and civilized communities, and their influence reaches every individual with an augmentation of all the means of human happiness. And it is but a despicable trick, below the wisdom of Jack Cade, to represent colleges as designed for the rich and not for the poor, for the few and not for the many.

What ought to be included in a liberal education? Or to state the question less abstractly, Ought the system of liberal education pursued in our colleges to be radically reformed? Whether it ought to be improved by being made more thorough, and more extensive, is not the question. That there is room for improvement, both in the text-books and in the manner of teaching, will be admitted in all quarters; and indeed the progress of improvement is no where more rapid or more sure than in the colleges of the United States. The question is, Whether radical reform, the re-construction of the system on new principles, ought to come in the place of improvement. To the discussion of this point, our author addresses himself very earnestly, and with good reason, for it is a point which in these times of enterprise, agitation, and revolution, is becoming daily more and more important.

On this question, opinions are offered in abundance by all sorts of theorists. Some cry out against mathematical study. What is the use of poring over conics and spherics; and if astronomy must needs be studied, why not learn it from some traveling lecturer, who, with the aid of diagrams and pictures, will make his pupils understand the whole subject well enough for all practical purposes in half a dozen evenings? Others argue against the study of the ancient classics, and demonstrate to their own satisfaction, the folly of bestowing time on the acquisition of languages that are never to be spoken; they hold it as a great principle, that whatever is dead ought to be buried; for even the few scraps of Latin that are uttered at commencement, have an ill savor in their nostrils. Some seem devoutly to believe, that our colleges are formed and conducted after the pattern seen in the mount by the angelic and seraphic doctors of the ages before the Reformation; and they demand that the colleges be re-modeled after some plan, they know not what, which they have heard of from Utopia. Some plead for a practical education: why should the pupil be puzzled with metaphysics?-Of what use will it be to him to be able to scan the odes of Horace or of Pindar?-Why should he learn the theory of eclipses, unless he expects to be a maker of almanacs?-Let him learn that which will come in play in the

practical details of the profession to which he expects to devote himself. Others, having an idea that colleges are unfavorable to piety, have no doubt that all colleges need a radical reform in this respect; and their theory is, that not the development and discipline of the intellectual faculties, but the culture of a devotional spirit, ought to be the distinctive character of college education. Others still, though they are not so many just now as they were three years ago,-believe that the present system of college education involves a great destruction of health and life; that multitudes of students die victims to the perverseness of college corporations and college faculties; and that such as escape with their lives, come out with broken constitutions, poor, puny, whitehanded, lily-livered, dyspeptic, wrecks and fragments of human nature; and their plan is, to add to all the labors of the mind the labor of the body, and by combining mechanical and agricultural industry with intellectual effort, to make the student a perfect man, furnished for every good word and work.

Looking now at all these aspects of the demand for a radical reform in colleges, we are arrested by a consideration which at first sight seems to be conclusive as to the nature and character of the demand. Such is the competition among the many colleges of this country, dependent as they all are on their merits, or at least on the public estimation of their merits, for support; and such is the readiness of the public to run after all sorts of novelties, particularly in education, that if there were any thing like an intelligent and real demand for a new system of college education, that demand would instantly be met. If a college in which Latin should be superseded by French, and Greek by German, and in which the diagrams of Gall and Spurzheim should receive equal attention with the diagrams of Euclid, were really demanded, such a college would soon be found; if such a system be really a wise one, the success of that college in bringing forward young men with superior qualifications for usefulness and success in active life, would soon compel all rival institutions to adopt an equally radical reform. But what is the fact? The cry that colleges are behind the age, and ought to be reformed by the lights of modern wisdom, is as old at least as our earliest recollections of such matters; and yet, hitherto it has been impossible for any institution, professing to give a liberal education, to obtain a permanent support without adopting substantially the same system with other colleges. Within a few years past, one college after another has been established with great professions of being more conformed than older institutions to the spirit and exigencies of the age. The interests of a sect or party, or the interests of a town, are supposed to require the establishment of a college. But the college must have funds, more than the sectarian interest,

or the local interest, or the combination of the two, can command; and it must have not only funds but students. In these circumstances, it easy for those interested to believe and say, that the exigencies of the age demand a great reform in the system of liberal education, and that such a reform is to be realized in their new institution. Thus the zeal of the projectors and patrons is quickened, a building is erected, professors are appointed, operations are commenced with great expectations of reform. But what is the result? After a few months, if we hear from that quarter at all, we hear no more of reforming the system of liberal education. We hear no more of a partial course and an English diploma, no more of a practical education, no more of the modern languages substituted for the ancient, no more of throwing mathematics into the back ground, and taking up something more agreeable and fascinating to the youthful mind. The institution which was to be so sweeping in its plan of reform,—so revolutionary in its bearings on the old monastic system, has gone over to the conservatives; and there, as in colleges upon whose charters the dust of ages has gathered, students are urged up the hill of science, groaning as they go under the oppression of a faculty so merciless as to insist on the discipline of Greek and mathematics. How does this come to pass? It comes to pass simply because, though the liberality and zeal of the public may endow an institution on the principles of reform, the common-sense of the public refuses to support such institutions. The father who wishes to educate his son; the young man who inspired with the love of knowledge, wishes to educate himself, will seek not that education which approaches nearest to the ideal of radical reform, but that which is most thorough and effectual; and it is soon found, that if the college is to be filled with students, and especially with such students as are worth having, the cry about reform must be hushed, and the same system, substantially, with that which is successful in other institutions must be adopted.

The demand, then, for radical reform in colleges, originates not in the common-sense of the country; not in the wishes of intelligent fathers, or of young men whose genius moves them to the pursuit of learning; but rather in the dreams of projectors, most of whom, if they had the opportunity, would refuse to send a son of theirs to a college framed according to their theory.

The demand for improvement is another thing; and in our serious judgment, the men who stand at the head of our colleges owe it to their country to spare no pains in raising the standard of liberal education as fast and as far as possible. This is to be done by insisting on a more extended and thorough preparation for college, and by making the mental discipline of college studies more rigorous and effectual.

Why should not a young man of competent talents, who has been studying Latin for two or three years, be expected to have a respectable knowledge of the Latin language? The time was when a shorter course of study secured for the pupil a more creditable acquaintance with Latin words and idioms, than is now possessed by more than one in twenty of those who present themselves for admission to college. But now the language is studied only in the way of analysis and translation from Latin into English. To speak Latin, to translate from English into Latin,-nay even to write Latin, unless it be some simple exercises in such a book as Clarke's Introduction, is a thing almost unheard of, except in a few schools preeminently favored. The consequence is, the pupil is led through the prescribed volumes of Virgil, Cicero, and Sallust, and is fitted for an examination on those volumes, but in the meanwhile learns very little Latin to any good purpose. In truth it is a principle which our modern grammar-schools seem to have lost sight of, that no language is learned effectually, unless the learner becomes master of it, that is, acquires the power of commanding its words and idioms for his own use. The old mode of teaching Latin was to unite analysis and synthesis,-to exercise the student not only in rendering from Latin into English, but also in rendering from English into Latin; and where this method. is pursued, and it is pursued still in the schools of every country but our own,-not only is the discipline of mind more valuable, but the power of reading a Latin author with ease and pleasure is acquired far more rapidly. It is a sinful waste of time and talent to teach Latin as it is now commonly taught in fitting boys for our colleges. Let the schools go back to the old method; and without occupying a month of additional time, they may send their pupils to college not merely fitted to "construe and parse" the prescribed books, but so well acquainted with the language as to be able thenceforward to read Latin authors profitably and with delight.

Nor is there any good reason why Greek should not be studied in the same way. For example, if the Greek testament is used as a classic, why should not the pupil learn not merely to read the Greek into English, but also to take the English testament, or, better still the Latin, and read it into Greek? To associate the English word with the corresponding Greek word is one process of mind. To associate the Greek word with the English is another process. Where the two associations are formed simultaneously, they greatly aid each other, and the whole is more. deeply fixed in the memory. In this way the task of learning the Greek language as well as the Latin, may be pretty effectually attended to before the pupil presents himself for the first time at college.

We are not ignorant, that no college can safely attempt to advance faster than the public, and the preparatory schools in particular, are prepared to follow. Yet we know on the other hand, that the schools in their modes of instruction, and in the diligence with which their pupils are trained, are greatly influenced by the colleges; and we are confident, that if some two or three of the leading colleges shall undertake gradually to bring about such an improvement as we have here indicated, they may in the course of a few years see this improvement actually secured, to the great advantage of the commonwealth.

Such an improvement having been effected in the scheme of preparatory study, the way is open of course for a more profitable employment of the four years spent within the walls of college. As things now are in most of our institutions, the study of the classics, occupying in all something like two years of the four, is the study of the Latin and Greek rather than of the authors or of the subjects treated by them. Horace and Homer are studied not as poetry, but only as Latin and Greek. Tacitus and Thucydides are studied not as majestic models of history, but as very hard Latin and Greek. Cicero de Officiis is not thought of as a book in moral philosophy; nor Cicero de Oratore as a treatise on rhetoric; but both are set down under the head of "dead languages." In some colleges we know it is not exactly so; perhaps in all, this description may seem a little like caricature; but we are sure, that the vicious mode of teaching Latin, into which our schools have fallen within the last sixty years, cripples the scholarship of most students, not only through college, but through life.

The most effective part of the college course of study, regarded as a system for the discipline of the mind, is to be found, as the colleges and schools now are, in the study of mathematics. The mathematical sciences have this advantage, that if studied at all, they must be studied with the mind wide awake,—the attention must be closely fixed upon a single point, the faculty of abstraction must be active, the process by which truth is evolved from truth, must be actually performed. Such benefits must result from any study of the mathematics, however imperfectly directed. These benefits do result to the college classes; and so far as we have had opportunity to compare the different developments of intellectual character formed by the methods of education at different institutions,-a comparison which may easily be instituted at a great theological seminary,-those colleges in which mathematical studies are most cultivated, generally produce the best disciplined minds. Yet we are far from imagining, that college education is to be improved by putting such studies more and more into the foreground, or by carrying the student over a more extended course of mathematics. On the contrary, we believe, that