English were the Spanish colonies in every mode of education, but
particularly in the cultivation of science. In many places Prescott
had more than hinted at this, but the materials for the whole story
were not available until our time.

Some of Bourne's paragraphs represent a severe arraignment of the
ignorance that has characterized so much of our supposed knowledge of
the Spanish Americans and their culture in the past. After reading
them it is easy to realize the truth of the expression that another
distinguished university man from the United States made use of not
long ago, after having visited the South American countries. He
declared that it was time for North Americans to wake up and
_discover_ South America. Literally we have known almost nothing about
it, indeed in a certain sense we have known much less than nothing,
since we were quite sure that we knew {493} practically all there was
to know while failing to know much that as Americans we ought to have
known.

Two Spanish-American universities were founded under Papal charters
almost a full century before Harvard as our first small college in
English America began its career. Harvard was not to be a university
in any proper sense of the term for a full century and a half after
its foundation, while the universities of Mexico and Peru, largely
under the influence of the ecclesiastical authorities and owing nearly
everything to Church patronage under the Spanish Crown, had all the
essential university faculties before the close of the sixteenth
century. In spite of the predominant Church influence, which, if we
were to credit former English traditions, must have been fatal to the
evolution of science, Professor Bourne's researches show that in _the
sixteenth century_ the Spanish-American universities were already
doing such scientific work as the students in English America became
interested in only during the _nineteenth century_. Obviously I prefer
to quote Professor Bourne's own words for such startling assertions.
He said in his chapter on "The Transmission of Culture" in his volume
in The American Nation Series, "Spain in America":

"Not all the institutions of learning founded in Mexico in the
_sixteenth century_ can be enumerated here, but it is not too much
to say that in number, range of studies and standard of attainments
by the officers _they surpassed anything existing in English America
until the nineteenth century_. Mexican schol