instead of making
extracts from it as I would otherwise like to do.

Attention, it is true, is paid throughout the college course to
mathematical studies, yet very little to their practical application;
while to Chemistry, the parent of modern physics, the manual (which is our
guide) prescribes two lessons per week to the introductory class, and to
the freshman, sophomore, and junior classes absolutely _none at all_!
Mining, Mechanical Engineering, Architecture, Theoretical Agriculture,
Biology, and Botany are utterly ignored; and no branch of Zoology is even
mentioned in the curriculum. We next come to a science more important,
because universal in its application and in its need than any other, viz.:
The Science of Human Well-being, commonly called Political or Social
Economy. Here, too, like exclusion! except that in the sophomore class,
for one term, one hour per week is given to it. That is to say, a people
who are to live by labor are left by the guardians of their education in
ignorance of the laws by which the reward for that labor must be
regulated; they who are to administer capital are to be left to blind
chance whether to act in accordance with those laws of nature which
determine its increase, or ignorantly to violate them!

Restrained again from quotation by the fear of wearying the Committee,
permit me to refer them to the lecture of Dr. Hodgson, delivered at the
Royal Institution of Great Britain, on "The Importance of the Study of
Economic Science," which will be found in the work of Professor Youmans,
on "The Culture demanded by Modern Life."

I confess to a feeling of deep discouragement at the perusal of such a
record as that presented by the course of studies at the College of the
City of New York, especially when I find that this is the state of things
a large number of the Trustees seem desirous of perpetuating. My views on
this subject are confirmed by the following remarks found in President
Barnard's Essay on "Early Mental Training, and the Studies best fitted for
it."

"Whatever may be the value of the study of the classics in a
subjective point of view, _nothing could possibly more thoroughly
unfit a man for any immediate usefulness_ in this matter-of-fact
world, or make him _more completely a stranger in his own home_, than
the purely classical education which used recently to be given, and
which, with some slight improvement, is believed to be still given b