education; and this College must steadily set before itself the ambition
to be able to give that education sooner or later. At present we are but
beginning, sharpening our educational tools, as it were, and, except a
modicum of physical science, we are not able to offer much more than is
to be found in an ordinary school.

Moral and social science--one of the greatest and most fruitful of our
future classes, I hope--at present lacks only one thing in our
programme, and that is a teacher. A considerable want, no doubt; but it
must be recollected that it is much better to want a teacher than to
want the desire to learn.

Further, we need what, for want of a better name, I must call Physical
Geography. What I mean is that which the Germans call "_Erdkunde_." It
is a description of the earth, of its place and relation to other
bodies; of its general structure, and of its great features--winds,
tides, mountains, plains; of the chief forms of the vegetable and animal
worlds, of the varieties of man. It is the peg upon which the greatest
quantity of useful and entertaining scientific information can be
suspended.

Literature is not upon the College programme; but I hope some day to see
it there. For literature is the greatest of all sources of refined
pleasure, and one of the great uses of a liberal education is to enable
us to enjoy that pleasure. There is scope enough for the purposes of
liberal education in the study of the rich treasures of our own language
alone. All that is needed is direction, and the cultivation of a refined
taste by attention to sound criticism. But there is no reason why French
and German should not be mastered sufficiently to read what is worth
reading in those languages, with pleasure and with profit.

And finally, by-and-by, we must have History; treated not as a
succession of battles and dynasties; not as a series of biographies; not
as evidence that Providence has always been on the side of either Whigs
or Tories; but as the development of man in times past, and in other
conditions than our own.

But, as it is one of the principles of our College to be
self-supporting, the public must lead, and we must follow, in these
matters. If my hearers take to heart what I have said about liberal
education, they will desire these things, and I doubt not we shall be
able to supply them. But we must wait till the demand is made.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] For a justification of what is here said about these sch