the species, and ranges each apart on a bed of
earth; and here, all day long, it digs, weeds, rakes, waters, adds
one manure after another, applies its powerful heating apparatus and
accelerates the growth and ripening of the fruit. On certain beds
it plants are kept under glass throughout the year; in this way it
maintains them in a steady, artificial atmosphere, forcing them to more
largely imbibe the nutritive liquids with which it floods the ground,
thus causing them to swell and become hypertrophied, so as to produce
fruits or vegetables for show, and which it exposes and which bring it
credit; for all these productions look well, many of them superb,
while their size seems to attest their excellence; they are weighted
beforehand and the official labels with which they are decorated
announce the authentic weight.

During the first quarter, and even the first half, of the (19th)
century, the system remained almost unobjectionable; it had not yet
pushed things to excess. Down to 1850 and later, all that was demanded
of the young, in their examinations and competitions, was much less
the extent and minutia of knowledge than proofs of intelligence and the
promise of capacity: in a literary direction, the main object was to
verify whether the candidate, familiar with the classics, could write
Latin correctly and French tolerably well; in the sciences, if he
could, without help, accurately and promptly solve a problem; if, again
unaided, he could readily and accurately to the end, state a long series
of theorems and equations without divergence or faltering; in sum, the
object of the test was to verify in him the presence and degree of
the mathematical or literary faculty.--But, since the beginning of the
century, the old subdivided sciences and the new consolidated sciences
have multiplied their discoveries and, necessarily, all discoveries end
in finding their way into public instruction. In Germany, for them to
become installed and obtain chairs, encyclopedic universities are found,
in which free teaching, pliant and many-sided, rises of itself to the
level of knowledge.[6362] With us, for lack of universities, they have
had only special schools[6363]; here only could a place be found for
them and professors obtained. Henceforth, the peculiar character of
these schools has changed: they have ceased to be strictly special
and veritably professional.--Each school, being an individuality, has
developed apart and on its o