}

meant as a private library, to be consulted occasionally in the lectures for the illustration of any particular part, and to be read afterwards for completing the whole." This, in its way, embodies the idea, and was at that time doubtless the only feasible substitute for post-graduate courses of study; and I can not refrain from saying here that many a student in later days would have been thankful for such an official list, or, in default of that, for some clear indication that such a list could easily be furnished if desired. More questionable is this:

They (the trustees) were very sensible that the knowledge of words, without making them subservient to the knowledge of things, could never be considered as the basis of education. To lay a foundation in the languages was very necessary as a first step, but without the superstructure of the sciences would be but of little use for the conduct of life.

The idea that language is crystallized thought in words and wordforms, as well as in the concatenations of words we call sentences; that literature is the expression of thought, meditation, and aspiration by means of this thought material, and that, as thought is of the innermost essence of humanity, these, its outward sensible manifestations, must be the most powerful instruments of human education, was perhaps hardly to be looked for in Dr. Smith's day; it may indeed be said that to the loud claim made in the name of physical science that in it is to be found the be-all and end-all of human education, has been in these latter days due the clearer perception of the true foundation of literature and language in a human scheme for human education. And it is curious to note that the first serious departure from Dr. Smith's scheme, and the first nearer approach to the present system lay just in the more independent position that was given to the study of languages. A fact that strikes one as curious and interesting in view of recent discussions is that the College course as he laid it down embraces only a period of three years; with reference to this he says: "No doubt the term of three years" will appear "too scanty a period for the execution of everything here proposed, and it must be acknowledged that a longer period would be necessary. But circumstances must always be regarded in the execution of every plan." This same question of three versus four years in the arrangement of College work we shall find coming up again; and it is proof of the far-reaching influence of Dr. Smith in determining the after course of the College that we find him cited (as an evident authority) on one side of the question in a way that shows clearly he had been appealed to by the other likewise.

An examination of the details of his curriculum is peculiarly interesting, and the more so as it evidently formed the basis of the College course down to 1828, and its influence can be distinctly felt as late as 1847. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that while several of the branches inserted by Dr. Smith disappeared in the various reorganizations of the course it was only (with one exception) to reappear later on, and to take upon themselves such enlarged and independent devel

opment as to pass for innovations that savored no little of the revolutionary. Our colleagues of the Wharton School and of the School of Biology had a legitimate predecessor in Dr. Smith. The scheme is laid in three parallel columns, representing each one of the three daily lectures. Each one of these columns evidently embraces a distinct province in the scheme of education, though in the second year the subjects proper to the second column have perforce overflowed slightly into the first. In the first lecture, after a preliminary training in logic and metaphysics to develop his powers of thought, the student is to be brought to a knowledge and practical sense of his position as a man and a citizen; and this by a course embracing ethics, natural and civil law, an introduction to civil history, to laws and government, to trade and commerce. By the second he is led up through an extended course in mathematics (including conic sections and fluxions) to the study of external nature in the branches of mechanics, physics, astronomy, natural history of vegetables and animals, chemistry, fossils, and agricul ture. While he was thus gaining the necessary elements for a proper appreciation of his condition as a member of the human race, and as the inhabitant of a world, subject to physical laws, the student in the third lecture (or period) was getting a training that should prepare him for the active exertion by tongue and pen of whatever abilities he possessed, so that the knowledge gained in the first two might be made available for the good of himself and his fellows through the skill acquired in the third. In this period was given the course in ancient languages and composition (except that Latin and English exercises occupied also the first two terms of the first period in the freshman year); the first year was devoted to reading the Iliad, Juvenal, Pindar, Cicero, Livy, Thucydides or Euripides, and Dionysius, with occasional declamations; the second to rhetoric and the critcal reading of (pseudo) Longinus, Horace's Ars Poetica, Aristotle's Poetics, selections from Quintilian, followed by Cicero pro Milone and Demosthenes de Corona, with compositions in imitation of them; the third to moral and legal works parallel with the studies of the first period; parallel with ethics were read Epictetus, Cicero de Officiis, Tusculan's Disputations, Xenophon's Memorabilia; parallel with the course in laws and government, Plato de Legibus, Grotius de Jure Belli et Pacis. And after the first and third lectures had thus been brought into unison and harmony, the last term of the senior year was utilized to bring the three periods into their proper relation by compositions and declamations on subjects given in the first two according to the principles developed in the third. Even this hasty examination of the scheme makes it abundantly evident that Dr. Smith had a very distinct aim in laying it out, a point worth pausing to consider, for it would be hard to find such definition of purpose in many a college course. He would send forth young men equipped with knowledge of themselves, their fellows, and of the natural order of the world, and able to impart this knowledge to

others, both as teachers and as writers. And what is equally worthy of remark, he was not satisfied with laying down independent courses to this end; these courses must interlock and mutually support one another, and ultimately converge into one focus as it were, so as to impress upon the minds of the young in very practical fashion the essential unity of the whole, and at the same time help to give unity and singleness of purpose to any after efforts they might make, as he was anxious they should, in the direction of self-culture.

The excellent provision he made for this further prosecution of study by lists of standard works has already been adverted to. Equally remarkable is the comprehensiveness of the scheme. If we regard the University as being what the modern Greeks in their mistranslation have called it, a лavenoτýpov, we are surprised to find how completely a compartment was prepared for each of the many specialties that have since grown from the small germs that then existed. It is true we miss any distinct provision for the study of literature; but one side of this study, the rhetorical, was certainly made much of in the teaching of the ancient classics and several at least of the works recommended for private reading, the Spectator, Locke, Lord Bacon, Dryden's Essays and Prefaces, were such as could not fail to communicate more than a tinge of literary culture. So that it is not too much to say that there was a seed here from which the study of English literature might naturally grow, and that the linguistic and literary study of Latin and Greek could easily be grafted upon the rhetorical pursuit of them here arrived at. As to the English tongue indeed, Dr. Smith was so earnest in his persuasion that it was of prime importance, and that in the English universities it had been too much neglected, that we may be sure, had he lived in our day, he would have been amongst the most zealous laborers to secure it a worthy place in the college he helped to found. Language and literary form were, to his mind, mere instruments of expression, tools that one might use clumsily or skillfully, and as such only did they claim a place in a college course. He was not alone in his view in those days (there are some who hold it yet, the more's the pity) and we need not be surprised that his beliefs took evident shape in the curriculum.

Below this, but in Dr. Smith's view forming part of the College, was a Latin and Greek school in four forms or stages, in which were read Eutropius, Nepos, Metamorphoses, Virgil, Cæsar, Sallust, Horace, Terence, Livy, the Greek Testament, Lucian, and Xenophon or Homer. In the last form English writing, original (themes, letters, descriptions, and characters) and translated from Latin "with great regard to punctuation and the choice of words," received special attention; English and Latin orations "are to be delivered, with proper grace, both of elocution and of gesture;" arithmetic was begun. "Some of the youth," he says, "go through these stages in three years, but most require four and many five years, especially if they begin under 9