IV. INSTITUTIONS' ACCEPTING CERTIFICATES AND DIPLOMAS OF THE REGENTS OF

THE UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK.

Monmouth College, Monmouth, Ill.
Amherst College, Amherst, Mass.
Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Mich.
St. Stephen's College, Annandale, N. Y.
Wells College, Aurora, N. Y.
Polytechnic Institute, Brooklyn, N. Y.
St. Lawrence University, Canton, N. Y.
Hamilton College, Clinton, N. Y.
Elmira College, Elmira, N. Y.

ON DIPLOMAS OR CERTIFICATES FROM APPROVED HIGH SCHOOLS AND ACADEMIES AND WHICH DO NOT PUBLISH A LIST OF SUCH SCHOOLS.

Does not include State institutions accepting such certificates and diplomas.

CHAPTER XXVI.

TECHNOLOGICAL INSTRUCTION IN THE LAND-GRANT COLLEGES.1

Probably the earliest chair explicitly though partly concerned with instruction in science was created by an American college. In 1727 Thomas Hollis, a merchant of London, "though jeered at and sneered at by many" (in England), persisted in his design to endow Harvard College with a "professorship of mathematics and physical science." It was not until 1730 that the "Principia" were firmly estab lished even at Newton's own university of Cambridge, while at Oxford it is said that the "majority of the residents regarded mathematics and Puritanism as allied and equally unholy subjects."

I.

In America the first institution of higher education that was induced by the liberality of an individual to recognize industrialism was Harvard College, which in 1816 established "a new institution and professorship in order to teach by regular courses of academical and public lectures, accompanied with proper experiments, the utility of the physical and mathematical sciences, and for the extension of the industry, prosperity, happiness, and the well-being of society." The founder of this chair was the celebrated experimental scientist, Count Rumford, a native of Woburn, Mass., where he had been known as Benjamin Thompson. How unprepared for the introduction of this subject the pedagogical world was at that date may be inferred from the fact that the college authorities, in view of the "novelty of the institution," required only four annual lectures to be given by the first professor while he prepared himself for the duties of his chair. In 1827 the professor resigned, and for seven years the vacancy remained unfilled.

At Yale and Princeton a chair of chemistry had been more fortunate. The study of general chemistry since the days of the alchemists has been found well adapted to inspire interest. Besides, the early chairs for this science were created at an epoch in European history when the discoveries of Cavendish and Priestly and the system of Lavoisier had made chemistry the order of the day; though even at Harvard chemistry was for years joined at first with materia medica and then with mineralogy. During the decade 1820-1830 a strong protest was made against the college curriculum in America. Efforts were made at Harvard, Amherst, and Yale to modify the course, and Union had alternatives as early as 1824. It is rather hazardous to attempt to account for this. After the close of the Revolutionary war Washington had deeply lamented that so many of the youth of this country studied in Europe, and after the close of the Napoleonic wars it again became quite fashionable for American students to continue their education in European universities. A constantly accelerated impetus may thus have been given to higher education in the United States by these students as they returned to their native land. Yet it seems

1 By Mr. Wellford Addis, specialist in the Bureau for obtaining and collating information relating to colleges of agriculture and the mechanic arts.

more probable that a new conception of a college curriculum was due to the example afforded by the University of Virginia, which was established 1818-1825, rather than to the slow process of organic development brought about by the efforts of individual professors.

It is not difficult to say where Mr. Jefferson got his idea of a university curriculum that bears a pretty close resemblance to the several bills (or projets, as they are called in France) introduced into the National Assembly by Mirabeau, Talleyrand, and Condercet (1789-1793), the representatives of a party with which Mr. Jefferson had very intimate relations during his residence at Paris from 1785 to 1789. But irrespective of the mere question as to the origin of the idea, the first comprehensive attempt in America to change the college curriculum was the founding of the University of Virginia. Gradually the practice of having parallel classical and scientific courses came to be a feature of our higher education. But there was room for another type, and as the idea of a Harvard came from England, and as the idea of a University of Virginia came directly or indirectly from France, so the idea of a Johns Hopkins came from Germany.

Such are the three university types of North America; but beside them there has arisen, another type, which at first had the character which Count Rumford desired to give to his chair at Harvard, but is now developing a strong tendency to claim for itself the disciplinary power that, in the sphere of literary research, the individual effort in the seminaria of Johns Hopkins is known to give, and for similar reasons. In this type the laboratory or shop takes the place of the library and quasi original manuscripts, and activity and concentration of thought are sought to be developed by the study of industrial operations and appliances rather than the power of philosophic generalization and the delicate sensibilities and discernment of the literary man through the study of the classics or other literature exclusively.

II.

In 1824 Stephen Van Rensselaer made an effort to do for the people directly through lectures what Count Rumford had desired to do for them through the medium of a college. Mr. Van Rensselaer had satisfied himself that great defects existed in the ordinary and prevailing systems of education; he "saw that some of the most useful subjects of human knowledge were scarcely communicated at all in quarters where they seemed most needed for the practical purposes of life." His first movement was to send a scientific person, with competent assistants and adequate apparatus, to deliver familiar lectures on chemistry, natural philosophy, and natural history. Having difficulty in finding competent lecturers, his next effort was to found a normal school of science, such perhaps as he may have heard that the first French Republic had established under the name L'École Normale. The principal object of the American school, as indeed the object of the French school, was to qualify persons to instruct the sons and daughters of tradesmen and farmers in the application of experimental chemistry, physics, and natural history to agriculture, domestic economy, arts, and manufactures. Such was the origin of the Rensselaer Institute. In 1839 "it was stated as a fact from calculations actually made, that the institute had itself furnished more experimental teachers and professors, engineers, geologists, etc., than had been furnished in the same time by all the colleges in the Union." Ten years later, however, it was found that "there were certain radical defects in the fundamental features of its organization, and that the course of study was undeniably somewhat vague, unsystematic, and incomplete." The course was altered to conform to the character of the instruction given in the polytechnic schools of Europe, and the word polytechnic added to the title of the school.

The munificence of Count Rumford began to tell at Harvard about 1847 in an unexpected way. Mr. Abbot Lawrence desired to found a school of practical science at Boston, and to encourage him Harvard appointed a chemist to fill the Rumford.

1 Only one of which can be said to be in a European sense of university grade.

professorship, chemistry then being the practical science of the day, with headquarters at Liebig's laboratory in Hesse-Darmstadt and Boussingault's farm in Alsace. Mr. Lawrence, in establishing the school now known by his name, considered that elementary and classical education had been amply provided for in Massachusetts. The classical schools would supply the professions with educated men, while the countinghouse or the ocean was the proper school for the votaries of commerce; but, he asked, where could industry educate her far more numerous votaries? As established, the Lawrence Scientific School was composed of three departments, with the Rumford professor as dean and the Rumford endowment as the financial foundation. These departments were practical chemistry, zoology, and civil engineering. The professor of chemistry had studied in Liebig's laboratory; Professor Agassiz organized the departments of geology and zoology, but what the department of engineering was to be no one knew. After considerable delay the ex-president of the college, Mr. Edward Everett, was appealed to to say what form this new department of higher education should take, and he is reported to have replied: "Well, my idea would be that you, the professor of engineering, should come to Cambridge and put up a sign as a surveyor and receive young men into your office." At first the school seems to have been a university all to itself, but in 1871 it was brought into close connection with the college, and the Rumford professorship "made to follow its particular objects, light and heat and the higher physics."

The influence of the researches of Liebig, Boussingault, and others in animal and vegetable chemistry and physiology has been already spoken of as sufficiently powerful to cause the Rumford professorship to be given to a chemist, and it may be inferred that the same influence was the efficient cause in the establishment of the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale. As early as 1846 the corporation of Yale College established two professorships of a scientific character. One of these was to give instruction in agricultural chemistry and animal and vegetable physiology, the other in practical chemistry. Like the Harvard venture in the same direction, "this department was left very much to take care of itself. No one in particular either helped or hindered its growth. Indeed, outside of those immediately and specially interested in it, no one troubled himself about it at all; and its position from the first was anomalous." About 1852 a third professorship or department was added to the other two, and to organize it the professor of civil engineering in Brown University came to Yale, bringing a class of 26 students with him. These professorships-disjecta membra of a school of science-were in the course of a year or two united into a 66 hypothetical institution called the Yale Scientific School," but there was no real connection between them until Mr. Sheffield, emulating Mr. Lawrence, gave $50,000 to support the Sheffield Scientific School, after purchasing a building in which to house it. The income derived from the fund given by Congress to the State of Connecticut, and then by the State to the Sheffield School, made its future doubly secure.

III.

In Vermont and in Virginia scientific schools of a peculiar character were founded during the fourth decade of the present century. This characteristic was the military feature. As the founder of the northern school resigned the superintendency of the Military Academy at West Point to establish the institution that in 1834 became the Norwich University, and as Virginia Military Institute was confessedly established upon the basis of the West Point institution, it may be assumed that the military features were copied from the national school rather than adopted for the pedagogical or humanitarian reasons that the classicists assign for the retention of Latin and Greek. Both of these institutions have been eminently successful in their way. A president of the northern school was killed while leading his regiment, the Ninth New England, up the heights of Chepultepec, and his son, another alumnus and a major-general, was killed in the late war, while five of the professors of

the southern school lost their lives as general or regimental officers; and it is related with melancholy generality that 200 of its alumni were slain in battle and 350 maimed for life.

IV.

Let us pause for a moment to summarize what has been said. It has been found that shortly after the close of the war of 1812, and the beginning of a manufacturing era in the United States, a series of attempts was made to teach the people, or a portion of them, the scientific facts which underlie the mechanic arts. Indeed, in 1830 this connection of the practical or useful with an institution of learning took a very singular turn, for at perhaps a dozen institutions, notably at the Oneida Institute of Science and Industry, a system of exercises was adopted on the farm or in a mechanic shop that was not only to serve as a means of physical exercise, but also to afford support to the student. Perhaps it is not just to charge this eccentricity to the account of the effort to supply American superintendents and foremen to American industry; yet in our polytechnic institutions established before the civil war we find no effort to impart skill as well as directive power. Civil engineers were called surveyors, and the other great branch of technical instruction, chemistry, was also of a character which may be denominated genteel. In the "fifties," and therefore coincident with the influx of first great foreign immigration, a demand sprang up for instruction in agriculture. Agricultural schools were established in Pennsylvania, in Iowa, and in other States, and in Michigan and Illinois the State normal schools, established about the same time, were to give instruction in husbandry, agricultural chemistry, and animal and vegetable physiology. But these schools and departments never flourished.

Attention was drawn from the genteel trades of chemistry and surveying, and the management of that very crude factory called a farm, to the business of making machines and industrial apparatus by the revival of industry that followed the civil war. Thus a class of institutions was called into life that had as their cardinal features-theretofore unknown-the performance of manual labor in a shop, and in a systematic manner.

Practical schools of mechanical engineering appeared almost simultaneously at Worcester, Mass., at Hoboken, N. J., and at Champaign, Ill. As the founders of the Worcester Free Institute were undoubtedly the first to provide for the practical laboratories or shops adapted to this mechanical instruction, it will be considered here as the type of the others. This school was founded by John Boynton, esq., of Templeton, in 1865, for the purpose of giving instruction in those branches of study which were not taught in the public schools, but which are essential and best adapted to train the young for practical life, especially as mechanics, manufacturers, or farmThese rather vague instructions would, in all probability, have entailed the usual literary course in books on mechanics, steam engines, boiler making, and the like, with the usual work in the chemical and physical laboratories. The school was rescued from this fate by the generosity of Ichabod Washburn, of Worcester, who, in 1866, added to its outfit a new feature which he described as follows:

ers.

"There shall be a machine shop of sufficient capacity to employ twnty or more apprentices, with a suitable number of practical teachers and workmen in the shop to instruct such apprentices, and provided with all necessary steam power, engines, tools, apparatus, and machinery of the most approved models and styles in use, to carry on the business of such machine shop in all its parts as a practical working establishment."

It will be observed that this indicates a museum and laboratory rolled up into one, and such an innovation can not be too greatly emphasized; for the study of books in which scientific facts are recorded can never compete successfully with the literatures of Greece or Rome as a means of mental training, unless the principles accepted by a society which those literatures have made are fundamentally changed. The ruling oligarchy which produced and supported those literatures left industry to