With us, scientific
pursuits and the study of Nature are receiving greater and greater
attention and engrossing a continually larger share of the interest,
the time, and the talent of students. There already exists, and there
is danger of its increase, in many of our best institutions of
learning, and many of our most educated men, an intellectual
onesidedness of a contrary, but not less unfortunate character, to that
which long existed at Oxford. The temper of our people, the wide field
for their energies, the development of the so-called practical traits
of character under the stimulus of our political and social
institutions, the solitary dissociation of America from the history and
the achievements of the Old World, the melancholy absence of monuments
of past greatness and worth,--these and many other circumstances
peculiar to our position all serve to weaken the general interest in
what are called classical studies, and to direct the attention of the
most ambitious and active minds far too exclusively to the pursuits of
science.
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