In our colleges the professors are paid for teaching and for teaching only, while in a foreign university the teaching is wholly secondary, and the professor is expected to announce in his lectures the results of his own study, and not the thoughts of other men. Until the whole status of the professors in our chief universities can be changed, very little original thought or investigation can be expected, and these institutions can not become what they should be, the soul of the higher life of the nation.
It is in your power, however, to bring about this change, but the reform can be effected in only one way. You must give to your universities the means of supporting fully and generously those men of genius who have shown themselves capable of extending the boundaries of human knowledge, and demand of them, only, that they devote their lives to study and research, and let me assure you that no money can be spent which will yield a larger or more valuable return.
If you do not look beyond your material interests, the higher life of the nation, which you will thus serve to cherish and foster, will guard your honor and protect your home; and, on the other hand, what can you expect in a nation whose highest ideal is the dollar or what the dollar will buy, but venality, corruption, and ultimate ruin?
But, rising at once to the noblest considerations, and regarding only the welfare of your country and the education of your race, what higher service can you render than by sustaining and cherishing the grandest thought, the purest ideals, and the loftiest aspirations which humanity has reached, and making your universities the altars where the holy fire shall be kept ever burning bright and warm?
Do you think me an enthusiast? Look back through history, and see for yourselves what has made the nations great and glorious. Why is it that, after twenty centuries, the memory of ancient Greece is still enshrined among the most cherished traditions of our race? Is it not because Homer sang, Phidias wrought, and Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Thucydides, with a host of others, thought and wrote? Or, if for you the military exploits of that classic age have the greater charm, do not forget that were it not for Grecian literature, Thermopylæ, Marathon, and Salamis would have been long since forgotten, and that the bravery, self-devotion, and patriotism which these names embalm were the direct fruits of that higher life which those great thinkers illustrated and sustained.
And, coming down to modern times, what are the shrines in our mother country which we chiefly venerate, and to which the transatlantic pilgrim oftenest directs his steps? Is it her battlefields, her castles and baronial halls, or such spots as Stratford-on-Avon, Abbotsford, and Rydal Mount? Why, then, will we not learn the lesson which history so plainly teaches, and strive for those achievements in knowledge and mental culture which will be remembered with gratitude when all local distinctions and political differences shall have passed away and been forgotten?
While I was considering the line of discourse which I should follow on this occasion, an incident occurred suggesting an historical parallel, which will illustrate, better than any reflections of mine, the truth I would enforce. The ship Faraday arrived on our coast after laying over the bed of the Atlantic another of those electric nerves through which pulsate the thoughts of two continents, and as I read the description of that noble ship, fitted out with all the appliances which modern science had created to insure the successful accomplishment of the enterprise, I remembered that not a century had elapsed since the first obscure phenomena were observed, whose conscientious study, pursued with the unselfish spirit of the scientific investigator, had led to these momentous results, and my imagination carried me back to an autumn day of the year 1786, in the old city of Bologna, in Italy, and I seemed to assist at the memorable experiment which has associated the name of Aloysius Galvani with that mode of electrical energy which flashes through the wire cords that now unite the four quarters of the globe.
Galvani is Professor of Anatomy in the University of Bologna, and there is hanging from the iron balcony of his house a small animal preparation, which is not an unfamiliar sight in Southern Europe, where it is regarded as a delicacy of the table. It is the hind-legs of a frog, from which the skin had been removed, and the great nerve of the back exposed. Six years before, his attention had been called to the fact that the muscles of the frog were convulsed by the indirect action of an electrical machine, under conditions which he had found very difficult to interpret. He had connected the phenomenon with a theory of his own: that electricity—that is, common friction electricity, the only mode of electrical action then known—was the medium of all nervous action; and this had led him into a protracted investigation of the subject, during which he had varied the original experiment in a thousand ways, and he had now suspended the frog's legs to the iron balcony, in order to discover if atmospheric electricity would have any effect on the muscles of the animal.
Galvani has spent a long day in fruitless watching, when, while holding in his hand a brass wire, connected with the muscles of the frog, he rubs the end, apparently listlessly, against the iron railing, when, lo! the frog's legs are convulsed.
The patient waiting had been rewarded, for this observation was the beginning of a line of discovery which was ere long to revolutionize the world. But Galvani was not destined to follow far the new path he had thus opened. The remarkable fact observed was this: The convulsions of the frog's legs could be produced without the intervention of electricity, or, at least, of the one kind of electricity then known, and Galvani soon found out that the only condition necessary to produce the result was, that the nerve of the frog should be connected with the muscle of the leg by some good electrical conductor.