. Euclid and Apollonius, indeed, carried the positive science of
mathematics to great height, but physical science is the growth of
comparative to-day; with habits of thought hampered by priesthoods and
systems, the efforts of antiquity were like abortive shoots,--it is
within the last four centuries that the strong stem has sprung up, and
the plant has flowered. Neither do our youth study the classics for
their science; and yet is not the pursuit of science nobler than all
other pursuits, since it leads its followers into the mysteries of the
creation and into the purposes of God? Small is the profit to be found
in recital of the fancies of heathen ages or the warfares of savage
tribes. But so far is the mere breath of the ancients exalted above this
sacred search, that a university will turn out proficients who write
Greek verses by the ream, but cannot spell their own speech; who can
name you the winning athletes of the first Olympiad, but are unable to
state the constituents of the gas that lights their page, and never
dream, as the chemist does, that these "sunbeams absorbed by vegetation
in the primordial ages of the earth, and buried in its depths as
vegetable fossils through immeasurable eras of time, until system upon
system of slowly formed rocks has been piled above, come forth at last,
at the disenchanting touch of science, and turn the night of civilized
man into day." They can paint to you the blush of Rhodope or Phryne,
till you see the delicious color blend and mingle on the ivory of their
tablets; but until, like Agassiz, we can all of us deduce the fish from
the scale, and from that blush alone deduce the human race, we are no
nearer the Divine intentions in the creation of man, for all such lore
as that. An author has somewhere asked, What signify our telegraphs, our
anaesthetics, our railways? What signifies our knowledge of the earth's
structure, of the stars' courses? Are we any the more or less men? But
certainly he is the more a man, he comes nearer to God's meaning in a
man, who conquers matter, circumstance, time, and space. That one who
sees the universe move round him understandingly, and fathoms in some
degree the wonder and the beauty of the eternal laws, must be a
pleasanter object to his Creator than any other who, merely employing
pleasure, makes a fetich of his luxuries, his Aldines and Elzevirs, and,
dying, goes into the unknown world no wiser concerning the ends and aims
of this one tha