ow you will not seek, to discount the
existence of other fields, or despise the laborers in those fields.
If you become an engineer, you will not condemn the classicist as
useless. If you are a Grecian, you will not despise the mechanical
engineer as crass and coarse.

One finds that the best men of any one field or calling are more
inclined to recognize the eminence of the claims of other fields or
callings. Smallness spells provincialism, and provincialism spells
smallness. I have heard one of the greatest teachers of chemistry say
that if he were to make a boy a professor of chemistry, he would,
among other things, first teach him Greek.

V

The first principle of college life is the principle of doing one's
duty. In your appreciation of scholarship, your first duty is to learn
your lessons. I have known many college men who learned their lessons,
who yet failed to get from the college all that they ought to get. But
I have never known a man who failed to get his lessons, whatever else
he may have got, to receive the full advantage of the course. The
curriculum of every good college is the resultant of scores or of
hundreds of years of reflection and of trial. It represents methods,
content, purposes, which many teachers through many experiments of
success and of failure have learned are the best forces for training
mind and for forming character.

But for the student to receive worthy advantage from these forces he
is obliged to relate himself to them by hard intellectual attention
and application. Sir Leslie Stephen says that the Cambridge teachers
of his time were not given to enthusiasms, but preached common-sense,
and common-sense said: "Stick to your triposes, grind at your mill,
and don't set the universe in order till you have taken your
bachelor's degree." The duty of the American college student is no
less evident. He is to stick to his triposes. His triposes are his
lessons. Among the greatest of all teachers was Louis Agassiz. A story
has become classical as told by the distinguished naturalist, the late
Dr. Samuel H. Scudder, regarding the methods of the great teacher with
his students.

In brief the story is that Mr. Scudder on going to Agassiz was told,
"'Take this fish and look at it. We call it a Haemulon. By and by I
will ask you what you have seen.' ... In ten minutes I had seen all
that could be seen in that fish.... Half an hour passed, an hour,
another hour; the fish began to look