If your lecture on universities, the first of your course, has been correctly reported to me, I am almost inclined to quarrel with you for having missed an excellent chance to help me, and advance the true interests of the college. You say that Natural History is getting too great an ascendancy among us, that it is out of proportion to other departments, and hint that a check-rein would not be amiss on the enthusiastic professor who is responsible for this.
Do you not see that the way to bring about a well-proportioned development of all the resources of the University is not to check the natural history department, but to stimulate all the others? not that the zoological school grows too fast, but that the others do not grow fast enough? This sounds invidious and perhaps somewhat boastful; but it is you and not I who have instituted the comparison. It strikes me you have not hit upon the best remedy for this want of balance. If symmetry is to be obtained by cutting down the most vigorous growth, it seems to me it would be better to have a little irregularity here and there. In stimulating, by every means in my power, the growth of the Museum and the means of education connected with it, I am far from having a selfish wish to see my own department tower above the others. I wish that every one of my colleagues would make it hard for me to keep up with him, and there are some among them, I am happy to say, who are ready to run a race with me. Perhaps, after all, I am taking up the cudgels against you rather prematurely. If I had not been called to New Haven, Sunday before last, by Professor Silliman's funeral, I should have been present at your lecture myself. Having missed it, I may have heard this passage inaccurately repeated. If so, you must forgive me, and believe me always, whatever you did or did not say,
Ever truly your friend,
LOUIS AGASSIZ.
FROM RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
CONCORD, December 13, 1864.
DEAR AGASSIZ,
I pray you have no fear that I did, or can, say any word unfriendly to you or to the Museum, for both of which blessings—the cause and the effect—I daily thank Heaven! May you both increase and multiply for ages!
I cannot defend my lectures,—they are prone to be clumsy and hurried botches,—still less answer for any report,—which I never dare read; but I can tell you the amount of my chiding. I vented some of the old grudge I owe the college now for forty-five years, for the cruel waste of two years of college time on mathematics without any attempt to adapt, by skillful tutors, or by private instruction, these tasks to the capacity of slow learners. I still remember the useless pains I took, and my serious recourse to my tutor for aid which he did not know how to give me. And now I see to-day the same indiscriminate imposing of mathematics on all students during two years,—ear or no ear, you shall all learn music,—to the waste of time and health of a large part of every class. It is both natural and laudable in each professor to magnify his department, and to seek to make it the first in the world if he can. But of course this tendency must be corrected by securing in the constitution of the college a power in the head (whether singular or plural) of coordinating all the parts. Else, important departments will be overlaid, as in Oxford and in Harvard, natural history was until now. Now, it looks as if natural history would obtain in time to come the like predominance as mathematics have here, or Greek at Oxford. It will not grieve me if it should, for we are all curious of nature, but not of algebra. But the necessity of check on the instructors in the head of the college, I am sure you will agree with me, is indispensable. You will see that my allusion to naturalists is only incidental to my statement of my grievance.
But I have made my letter ridiculously long, and pray you to remember that you have brought it on your own head. I do not know that I ever attempted before an explanation of any speech.