IV
I also desire that you should be a man of scholarly sympathy and appreciation. I can hardly hope you will be a scholar. Yet you may. The scholar seldom emerges. If one out of each thousand students, entering the American college this year, should prove to be a scholar, the proportion is as large as one can hope for. For up to one in a thousand is as big a proportion as the world is prepared to accept. Yet it is to be hoped that you and that most men should have appreciation and sympathy with scholarship. You should know what scholarship means: in work as toilsomeness, in method as wisdom, in atmosphere as thoroughness and patience, in result as an addition to the stock of human knowledge. If you be a laborer in one field, you should not seek, and I know 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 Hæmulon. 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 loathsome. I turned it over and around; looked it in the face—ghastly!—from behind, beneath, above, sideways, at three-quarters view—just as ghastly. I was in despair. At an early hour I concluded that lunch was necessary; so, with infinite relief, the fish was carefully replaced in the jar, and for an hour I was free.
"On my return I learned that Professor Agassiz had been at the Museum, but had gone, and would not return for several hours.... Slowly I drew forth that hideous fish, and, with a feeling of desperation, again looked at it. I might not use a magnifying glass; instruments of all kinds were interdicted. My two hands, my two eyes, and the fish; it seemed a most limited field.... At last a happy thought struck me—I would draw the fish; and now with surprise I began to discover new features in the creature....