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LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-NO. 1127.—6 JANUARY, 1865

An Address* on the Limits of Education, read before the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 16, 1865. BY JACOB BIGELOW, M.D.

To appreciate what has been done by the applied sciences operating through their dependent and associate arts, we have only to go back a little more than two thirds of a IN 1829 a volume was published in Boston century, to the times of Franklin and Washbearing the name of "Elements of Tech-ington, and in many cases to those of our own immediate fathers. In those days of small nology." This name was not then in use nor was it generally understood, except by lives in a sort of destitution which in this things, men were compelled to pass their those who drew its meaning from its etymology. It w is not in Johnson's Dictionary, nor age of scientific luxury would be considered yet in Rees's Cyclopædia. In Worcester's a state of semi-barbarism. The means of domestic convenience, personal neatness, Dictionary, where it now has a place, no older authority is cited for its support than easy locomotion, rapid intelligence, agreeable warmth, abundant light, physical as well ed for, but not yet found. as intellectual, were things wished and wait

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that of the volume alluded to. Its analogue
indeed was extant in some other languages,
and fifty years ago was published in Latin
among the
Theses" of the graduating
class of Harvard College. But its revival
for the use of English readers had to be jus-
tified by the assertion that it might be found
in some of the older dictionaries.

To us, their effeminate descendants, it might be painfully interesting to witness the efforts of these hardy and much enduring people to procure warmth in their dwellings, by the scorching and freezing of their alternate sides, under the blast that swept Such, less than forty years ago, was the from many apertures towards the current of 'doubtful tenure in English literature of a word which now gives name in this city to things was hardly bettered by the estaba vast open chimney. And this state of a vigorous and popular institution, a large lished zero temperature of an unwarmed endowment, a magnificent edifice, and at the same time a great and commanding de-church, or the irrespirable atmosphere of a stove-heated school room or country court partment of scientific study in every quar- house. Our recent progenitors read their ter of the civilized world.

It has happened in regard to technology that in the present century and almost under our own eyes, it has advanced with greater strides than any other agent of civilization, and has done more than any science to enlarge the boundaries of profitable knowledge, to extend the dominion of mankind over nature, to economize and to utilize both labor and time, and thus to add indefinitely to the effective and available length of human existence. And next to the influence of Christianity on our moral nature, it has had a leading sway in promoting the progress and happiness of our

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dusky and infrequent newspaper by the light of a tallow candle, and groped their way through dark and unpaved streets unIf in summer they desired a draught of cold der the guidance of a peripatetic lantern. wished for dry feet, there was no India rubwater, there was no ice; and if in winter they ber. If in darkness they sought for light, there was neither gas nor even lucifer

matches.

Men were stationary in their habits and deliberate under their necessities. He who would communicate with a friend in a neighboring State might do it in a week, provided he could devote a preparatory week to seeking a safe private conveyance. And if any one had occasion to transport himself from one town or city to another, he could do it on a trusty saddlehorse, or still more rapidly in the organized relays of the Boston and New York stage coach "Despatch Line," which undertook to put him through 1441.

in less than a week. They who went down to the sea in ships could reach England from either of the above named ports in from one to two months if wind and weather were favorable. Literary productions were written out with a goosequill, and printed in a reasonable time by the labor of two men toiling at a hand-press. Housewives plied the spinning-wheel, the distaff and the shuttle, and webs of coarse texture grew into perceptible existence with a speed which might be compared to that of a growing vegetable. Beef was roasted on a revolving spit, turned round by a man, a dog, or a smoke jack. And what will hereafter be accounted still more strange, garments were made by sewing slowly together their constituent parts with a needle and thread. I have taken technology as a leading exponent of the great advance which was to be made, and has been made, during the lifetime of some of us, in certain intellectual and practical improvements of mankind, in supplying the wants, overcoming the difficulties and increasing the elegances of life. To enumerate all these improvements would simply be to recount the great steps by which our own age has advanced to the elevated and privileged condition in which we now see it. And yet, although the practical arts, in the hands of science, have taken the lead in the great visible changes of the present century, it would be presumptuous to call technology the only field from the cultivation of which mankind have "obtained abundant and unlooked for harvests. In every other walk or sphere of science, literature, and refined humanity, the civilized world, with unfaltering progress, has pushed forward, at the same time, its dominion over mind and matter.

If in the days of the ancient Greeks "life was short," while "art was long," how is it now, when life is not longer, but art, literature and science are immeasurably greater? How will it be in another half century, when new discoveries shall have arisen commensurate in their results with those of electro-magnetism and of solar actinism, of modern optical combinations and geographical and geological explorations? How will it be with the discoveries of newly armed astronomers and the calculations of geometers yet to appear, — with revolutions stirred up by chemists among elements that have slumbered together since the creation, with the augmented conversions of heat into force, driving innumerable mechanisms to minister to man's pleasure and power, and more than all, how will it be with the cumbrous, vast and insurmountable weight of books, which shall render literary distinction a thing of chance, of uncertainty, perhaps even of impossibility.

A law which obtains in matter, obtains also in regard to the mind and its acquirements, that strength is not increased in proportion to magnitude. The static and dynamic strength of materials for the most part decreases as their bulk increases. A column or a bridge cannot be carried beyond a certain size without crushing or breaking its substance, and a whale, if unsupported by the surrounding water, would die from the pressure of his own weight. A small animal will leap many more times his length than a large one, and the integ rity of his slender limbs will not be injured by the exertion. The useful development of a tree is known to be promoted by severe pruning, and where this is impossible, as in It is the object of the present remarks to primeval forests, the trees prune themselves show that the amount of knowledge appro- and attain greater height by the death of priate to civilization which now exists in their under branches, the insufficient supply the world is more than double, and in many of sunlight being monopolized by the upper cases more than tenfold, what it was about and dominant members at the expense of half a century ago, and that therefore no the lower. These examples, drawn both individual can expect to grasp in the limits from inert and organic maiter, may serve to of a lifetime even an elementary knowl- illustrate the corresponding truth that huedge of the many provinces of old learn- man intellect, though varying in capacity ing, augmented as they now are by the in different individuals, has its limits in all vast annexations of modern discovery. plans of enlargement by acquisition, and Still farther, education which represents that these limits cannot be transcended the threshold of accessible knowledge, in- without aggregate deterioration in distractstead of being expanded, must be contracting the attention, overloading the memory ed in the number and amount of its require- or overworking the brain and sapping the ments, so that while all its doors are freely foundations of health. kept open to those who possess time, opportunity and special aptitude or necessity, a part of them at least must be closed to those who do not possess those requisites.

The school system of New England is at the present moment our glory and our shame. We feel a just pride that among us education is accessible to all, because

But if so much has been done in the more difficult and inaccessible parts of our globe, how much more has been achieved in the parts accessible to settlement and cultivation. The American continent, the interior map of which was almost a blank at the close of our Revolution, is now profusely dotted with towns, cities, forts, post offices and rail s ations, until the most diligent compiler of a Gazetteer is obliged to pause in despair at the manifest defects of his latest edition.

our public schools are open to the humblest | Sea, or any thing like an Antarctic Contipersons. But in our zeal for general in- nent. struction, we sometimes forget that a majority of men and women must labor with their hands, that the world may not stand still, and that all may not lose by disuse the power to labor. We cannot train all our boys to be statesmen and divines, nor all our girls to be authors and lecturers or even teachers. We ought not, therefore, to drive them into the false position of expecting to attain by extraordinary effort a place which neither nature nor circum stances have made possible. Many unfortunate children have been ruined for life, in body and mind, by being stimulated with various inducements to make exertions beyond their age and mental capacity. A feeble frame and a nervous temperament are the too sure consequences of a brain overworked in childhood. Slow progress, rather than rapid growth, tends to establish vigor, health and happiness. It has always appeared to me that a desirable and profitable mode of school education would be one in which every hour of study should be offset by another hour of exercise required to be taken in the open air.

Geology may be considered as almost a creation of the present age. When Werner visited Paris, in 1802, it could hardly be. said to consist of more than insulated observations with a few crude and unsettled theories. But now it has become a great, organized, and overshadowing department of science. In every language of Europe it has its voluminous systems and its unfailing periodicals. Societies of special organization carry forward its labors, and every country of the globe is traversed by its observers and collectors. The shelves of museums are weighed down by its accumulations, and in its palæontology alone the Greek language is exhausted to furnish factitious names for the continually developed species of antecedent creations.

To illustrate the impossibility of making any one what may be called a general scholar, we need but to take a slight view of the extent and recent progress of a few of the most familiar and popular sciences at Chemistry in a limited degree appears to the present day. Let us take geography, have attracted the attention of the ancients, which treats of the earth's external struc- but of their proficiency in this pursuit we ture, and geology which treats of its inter- know more from their preserved relics and nal. In the first of these the education of results than from their contemporaneous many of the present generation abounded records. In modern times the chemists in what are now found to be errors and constitute a philosophical community havdefects. We were taught that the Andes ing a language of their own, a history of were the highest mountains of the globe, their own, methods, pursuits and controand the Amazon the longest river. Dis- versies of their own, and a domain which coverers had then stopped a thousand miles short of the sources of the Nile and of the Missouri. The Columbia and the Sacramento were geographical myths, while a fabulous Oregon or River of the West was laid down on the maps on the hearsay authority of Carver, displacing what are now the Rocky Mountains, and entering the Pacific Ocean about latitude 43°. The existence of the African Niger was known to the Romans, yet the Royal Geographical Society until 1830 did not know where it reached the ocean, though a hundred Englishmen at various times had laid down their lives in African deserts in fruitless attempts to resolve the mysterious problem. It was not until a still later period that the world knew that there was a continuous Arctic

is coextensive with the materials of which our globe is made. Many men of gifted minds and high intellectual attainments, have devoted their lives to the prosecution of this science. Chemistry has unravelled the early mysteries of our planet, and has had a leading agency in changing the arts and the economy of human life. It now fills the civilized world with its libraries, laboratories and lecture-rooms. No individual can expect to study even its accessible books, still less to become familiar with its recorded facts. Yet chemistry is proba bly in its infancy, and opens one of the largest future fields for scientific cultivation.

Natural history in its common acceptation implies the investigation, arrangement and description of all natural bodies, in

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