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Education: How Old The New

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Title: Education: How Old The New

Author: James J. Walsh


        
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Language: English

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[Transcriber's note]

  This is derived from a copy on the Internet Archive:
    http://www.archive.org/details/educationhowold00walsgoog

  Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly
  braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred
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[End Transcriber's note]


EDUCATION

HOW OLD THE NEW


BY


JAMES J. WALSH, M.D., Ph.D., Litt. D.

Dean and Professor of the History of Medicine and of Nervous Diseases
at Fordham University School of Medicine; Professor of Physiological
Psychology at the Cathedral College, New York.



SECOND IMPRESSION



NEW YORK

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

1911



COPYRIGHT. 1910, BY

JAMES J. WALSH



Published October 20th, 1910

Second Impression March 20th, 1911


  THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
  RAMWAY, N.J.



TO THE

_Xavier Alumni Sodality_

Most of the thoughts contained in this volume were originally
expressed at our breakfasts. It seems only fitting, then, that on
presentation to a larger audience they should be dedicated to you.

J. J. W.
_Our Lady's Day._ August 15, 1910


{v}


PREFACE

The reason for publishing this volume of lectures and addresses is the
persuasion that present-day educators are viewing the history of
education with short-sighted vision. An impression prevails that only
the last few generations have done work of serious significance in
education. The history of old-time education is neglected, or is
treated as of at most antiquarian interest and there is a failure to
understand its true value. The connecting link between the lectures
and addresses is the effort to express in terms of the present what
educators were doing in the past. Once upon a time, when I proclaimed
the happiness of the English workmen of the Middle Ages, the very
positive objection was raised, "How could they be happy since their
wages were only a few cents a day?" For response it was only necessary
to point out that for his eight cents, the minimum wage by act of
Parliament, the workman could buy a pair of handmade shoes, that being
the maximum price established by law, and other necessaries at similar
prices. If old-time education is studied with this same care to
translate its meaning into modern values, then the very oldest
education of which we have any record takes on significance even for
our time.

{vi}

While it is generally supposed that there are many new features in
modern education, it requires but slight familiarity with educational
history to know that there is very little that is novel. Such
supposedly new phases as nature-study and technical training and
science, physical as well as ethical, are all old stories, though they
have had negative phases during which it would be hard to to trace
them. The more we know about the history of education the greater is
our respect for educators at all times. Nearly always they had a
perfectly clear idea of what they were trying to do, they faced the
problems of education in quite the same spirit that we do and often
solved them very well. Indeed the results of many periods of old-time
education are much better than our own, even when judged by our
standards.

Unfortunately there exists a very common persuasion that evolution
plays a large role in education and that we, "the heirs of all the
ages in the foremost files of time," are necessarily in the forefront
of educational advance. There has been much progress in education in
the last century, but it would, indeed, be a hopeless world if there
had not been progress out of the depths in which education was plunged
in the eighteenth century. There were a number of reformers in
education at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the
nineteenth century. It was rather easy to be an educational reformer
at that time. The lowest period in the history of {vii} education was
about the middle of the eighteenth century. It has been assumed that
since we are far ahead of that generation we must be still farther
ahead of the people who preceded them. That is the mistake. There are
periods of education of very great significance centuries long before
that time.

In educational lectures and addresses for the past five years, I have
been trying to translate into modern terms the meaning of these old
periods of education. A great many teachers have thought the ideas
valuable and suggestive and so I am tempted to publish them in book
form. There is an additional reason, that of wishing to create a bond
of sympathy between the two systems of education that have grown up in
this country. For some three generations now Catholic educators have
been independently building up a system of education from the
elementary schools to the university. The American world of education
is coming to recognize how much they have accomplished. There has even
been some curiosity expressed as to how it was all done in spite of
apparently insuperable obstacles. One phase of Catholic education, its
thorough-going conservatism and definite effort to value the past
properly and take advantage of its precious lessons, is here
represented.

My own educational interests have been taken up much more of late
years with medicine than with other phases of this subject. Hence the
{viii} volume contains certain addresses relating to the history of
medical education. They are more intimately linked with the general
subject of education than might perhaps be thought. We have had finely
organized medical education at a number of times in the past, and,
indeed, at the present moment can find inspiration and incentive in
studying the legal regulation of medicine and of medical education in
what might seem to be so-unpromising a time as the thirteenth century.
For true educational progress there has always been need of close
sympathy between the non-professional and the professional department
of universities. Only when the professional schools are real graduate
departments, requiring under-graduate training for admission, is the
university doing its work properly. This was the rule in the
past--hence the precious lessons for the present in the story of
these old-time universities.

These lectures and addresses were actually delivered, not merely read.
They were written with that purpose. Certain repetitions that would
have been avoided if the articles had been prepared directly for
reading and not for an audience, may be noted. Some of the subjects
overlap and certain phases had to be treated usually in variant form
in different lectures. For these faults the reader's indulgence is
craved.



CONTENTS

CHAPTER                                               PAGE

I.    EDUCATION, HOW OLD THE NEW                         8

II.   THE FIRST MODERN UNIVERSITY                       63

III.  MEDIAEVAL SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSITIES                 93

IV.   IDEAL POPULAR EDUCATION                          155

V.    CYCLES OF FEMININE EDUCATION AND INFLUENCE       199

VI.   THE CHURCH AND FEMININE EDUCATION                273

VII.  ORIGINS IN AMERICAN EDUCATION                    299

VIII. THE MEDICAL PROFESSION FOR SIX THOUSAND YEARS    349

IX.   UNIVERSITY MEDICAL SCHOOLS                       377

X.    THE COLLEGE MAN IN LIFE                          403

XI.   NEW ENGLANDISM                                   433




EDUCATION, HOW OLD THE NEW




  "Nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say:
  Behold this is new: For it hath already gone before in the ages that
  were before us."
  --_Ecclesiastes i:10_.


  "Nullum est jam dictum, quod non dictum sit prius."
  --Terence, _Eun. Prol.,_ 41.
  [Nothing is now said which was not said before.]


  St. Jerome relates that his preceptor Donatus, commenting on this
  passage of Terence, used to say: "Pereant qui ante nos nostra
  dixerunt."
  [May they perish who said our good things before us.]


{3}

EDUCATION, HOW OLD THE NEW [Footnote 1]

  [Footnote 1: Material for this lecture was gathered for one of a
  course of lectures on Phases of Education delivered at St Mary's
  College, South Bend, Ind., at the Sacred Heart Academy, Kenwood,
  Albany, N. Y., and at St. Mary's College, Monroe, Mich, 1909. In
  somewhat developed form it was delivered to the public school
  teachers of New Orleans at the beginning of 1910. In very nearly its
  present form it was the opening lecture at the course of the
  Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, on "How Old the New Is,"
  delivered in the spring of 1910.]

Popular lectures are usually on some very up-to-date subject. Indeed,
as a rule they are on subjects that are developing at the moment, and
the main aim of the lecturer is to forecast the future. It is before a
thing has happened that we want to know about it now, and though, as
not infrequently occurs, the lecturer's forecast does not in the event
prove him a prophet nor the son of a prophet, for nature usually
accomplishes her purposes more simply than the closet philosopher
anticipates, at least we have the satisfaction for the moment of
thinking that not only are we up to date but a little ahead of it.
Unfortunately I have to claim your indulgence this evening in this
matter, for taking just the opposite course. I am to talk about the
oldest book in the world, its old-fashioned yet novel contents, its
up-to-date applications, and its significance for the history of the
race and, above all, the history of education. The {4} one interesting
feature, as I hope, of what I have to say, is that old-time methods in
education as suggested by this little volume are strangely familiar
and its contents are as significant now as they were in the old time
from which it comes. The book was written almost as long before
Solomon as Solomon is before us, yet there is a depth of practical
wisdom about it that eminently recalls the expression "there is
nothing new under the sun."

So much attention has been given to education in recent years, we have
made such a prominent feature of it in life, have spent so much money
on it, have devoted so much time and thought to its development and
organization, that we feel very sure that what we are doing now in
every line of educational effort represents--indeed must represent--a
great advance over anything and everything that was ever accomplished
in the past. To say anything else would seem to most people pure
pessimism. It would mean that in spite of all the efforts of men we
were not making advances. As a matter of fact, all of us know that it
is quite possible to make heroic efforts so sadly misdirected that
they accomplish nothing and get us nowhere. Progress depends not on
effort but on the proper direction of the effort. We are supposed,
however, to represent one phase and that at the front rank of an
inevitable advance in things human, pushed forward, as it were, by the
wheel of evolution in its ceaseless progress, and bound {5} therefore
to make advancement. It is with this idea, so commonly accepted, that
I would take issue by showing how much was accomplished in the past
that anticipates much of what we are occupied with at the present
time, and that serves to show what men can accomplish at any time when
they set themselves to doing things with high ideals, well-considered
purpose and strenuous effort.

There are those who insist that unless men have the encouraging
feeling that they are making progress, their efforts are likely to be
less strenuous than would otherwise be the case. There are those who
think apparently that compliments make the best incentive for
successful effort. Some of us who know that the world's best work, or
at least the work of many of the world's great men, has been done in
the midst of opposition, in the very teeth of criticism, in spite of
discouragement, may not agree with that opinion. The history of
successful accomplishment seems to show, indeed, that incentive is all
the stronger as the result of the opposition which arouses to renewed
efforts and the criticism which strips whatever is new of errors that
inevitably cling to it at the beginning. On the other hand, if there
is anything that the lessons of history make clear it is that
self-complacency is the very worst thing, above all for intellectual
effort of any kind, and that criticism, when judicious, is always
beneficial.

Above all, comparisons are likely to be {6} chastening in their
effects to make us realize that what we are doing at any particular
time does not mean so much more than what many others have done and
may indeed even mean less. It is rather interesting, then, to set our
complacent assurance that we are doing such wonderful work in
education and represent such magnificent progress over against some of
the educational work of the past. After all we are not nearly so
self-congratulatory about our education, its ways and methods and,
above all, its success as we were a dozen years ago. There are many
jarring notes of discordant criticism of methods heard, there are many
deprecatory remarks passed with regard to our supposed success, and
there have been some educators unkind enough,--and, unfortunately,
they are often of the inner circle of our educational life,--to say
that we are lacking in scholarship to a great degree, and that much of
our so-called educational progress has been a tendency toward an
accumulation of superficial information rather than a training of the
intellect for power. The absolute need of the distinction between
education for information and for power has been coming home to us.
Above all, we have felt that we were not a little deceived by
appearances in education and so are more ready to listen to
suggestions of various kinds.

Under these circumstances it has seemed to me, that a calling of
attention to what was accomplished at certain long-past periods for
{7} education, would not only be of interest as information for
teachers, but might possibly be helpful or at least suggestive, in the
midst of the somewhat disordered state of mind that has resulted from
recent criticisms of our educational methods and success, by men whose
interest in education cannot be doubted and whose opportunities for
knowing are the best. For we are in a time when nearly every important
educator, president of a university, dean of a department, old-time
teacher or old, thoughtful pupil with the interest of _Alma Mater_ at
heart, who has had something to say with regard to education has said
it in rather derogatory fashion. Perhaps, then, it will do us good to
study the periods of the past and see what they did, how their methods
differed or still more often were like our own, what their success was
like and what we may learn from them. The surprising thing is the
number of repetitions of present-day experiences in education that we
shall find in the past. This is true, however, in every mode of
thinking quite as well as in education, once careful investigation of
conditions is made.

If we begin at the beginning and take what is sometimes called the
oldest book in the world, we shall see how early definite educational
ideas took form. It is a set of moral lessons or instructions given,
or supposed to be given, by a father to his son. The father's name was
Ptah Hotep. He was a vizier of King Itosi of the Fifth Dynasty in
Egypt, some time about 3500 B.C. {8} The Egyptologists used to date
him earlier than that, but in recent years they have been clipping
centuries off Egyptian dates until perhaps King Itosi must be
considered as having lived probably not earlier than 3350 B.C. That
makes very little difference for our purpose, however. The oldest
manuscript copy of the book was written apparently not later than 2900
b.c. It exists as the famous Prisse Papyrus in the Bibliotheque
Nationale in Paris. There is another copy in the British Museum. There
is a pretty thorough agreement as to these dates, so that we can be
sure that this little book which has come to be known as the
Instruction of Ptah Hotep, or the Proverbs of Ptah Hotpu--another form
of his name with a variation in the title--represents the wisdom of
the generations who lived in Egypt about 5000 years ago. It was
written, as I have said, almost as long before Solomon as Solomon is
before us, so that the character of the moral instructions which it
contains is extremely interesting.

There must have been a number of copies of it made. This and books
like it were used as schoolbooks in Egypt. They were employed somewhat
as we employ copybooks. The writing of the manuscript is the old
hieratic, cursive writing of the Egyptians, not their hieroglyphics,
and the children used portions of this book as copies, listened to
dictation from it and learned to write the language by imitating it.
Of books similar to it we have a number of manuscript copies. Some {9}
of these copies preserved from before 2000 B.C. are full of errors
such as school children would make in taking down dictation. This was
their method of teaching spelling, and after the children had spelled
the words the teacher went over them and corrected the mistakes. These
corrections were made in a different colored ink from that used by the
pupils! The whole system of teaching, as it thus comes before us,
resembles our own elementary school teaching much more than we might
think possible. Spelling, writing, composition are all taught in this
way yet, or at least they were when I was at school, and while I have
heard that some of the old-fashioned methods were going out, I have
also received some hints of the reaction by which they are coming in
again, so that the Egyptian methods take on a new interest.

Perhaps there is no more interesting feature of the education of that
olden time than the fact that these books which were used as copybooks
in the school contain moral lessons. We have been neglecting these in
our schools and have come to recognize the danger of such neglect.
Definite efforts at the organization of moral teaching in some form
are being made by many teachers, and their necessity is recognized by
all educators. All of these old Egyptian books, then, will have a
special claim on our interest at the present time. Above all, the
oldest of them, though it is literally the oldest book in the world,
merits {10} our attention, because its moral teaching is very
clear-cut and its emphasis on ethical precepts very pronounced.

We would be very prone to think that what an old father has to say to
his boy over fifty centuries ago would have, at most, only an
antiquarian interest for us. It is not easy even to imagine that the
old gentleman could have known human nature so well and written from
so close to the heart of humanity because of his love for his boy,
that his words would always have a practical application in life.
Such, however, is actually the case. Any father of the modern time
would be proud to be able to give to his boy the eminently practical
maxims that this old father has written down. If there is any advice
that will be helpful for youth, for the young usually demand that they
shall have their own experience and not take it at second hand, this
is the advice that is of value. Only fools, it is said, learn by their
own experience, but then there is good Scripture warrant for believing
that they were not all wise men in the olden time, and we are pretty
well agreed that all the fools are not dead yet. If advice can be of
service, however, from one generation to another, then here is the
wisdom of age for the inexperience of youth. At least it will serve
after the event to show youth that it was properly warned and that it
is entirely its own fault if it has been making a fool of itself--as
other generations have done before.

{11}

It might be expected that at least in form these old-time maxims would
be rude and crude, expressed with an old man's loquaciousness and with
many personal foibles. Fortunately for us, while to his son Ptah Hotep
was very probably an old man, he was not what most of us would call
old. In Egypt they married comparatively young. This boy was probably
the oldest son. It is usually for the oldest that such advice is
treasured up and written out. The father then, giving his advice just
as his son was leaving the paternal household when he had married a
wife and was about to set up a home of his own, was probably not more
than forty. To seventeen or eighteen, forty is quite ancient. To most
of the rest of us it is entirely too young to be trusted absolutely in
serious matters. Aristotle declared that a man's body reaches physical
perfection at thirty-five and his mind reaches intellectual maturity
at forty-nine. His students were inclined to think that this age was
entirely too old, his philosophic contemporaries of his own generation
and the members of national academies and learned societies of most of
the generations since, have been quite sure that the term set was
entirely too young.

Ptah Hotep's son, then, very probably looked on his father as most
sons under twenty are prone to do, as a dear old-fashioned gentleman
(he does not like to use the word old fogy for his father, reserving
it for the fathers of others), who would {12} be quite tolerable if he
only had a little more sympathy with the wonderful advance that is in
the world in this new generation. The real young man of the time,
however, was the father who wrote his maxims, the condensed wisdom of
his experience of life, with a directness, an absolute clarity, an
occasional appeal to figures of speech and a variety of expression so
striking as to make his work literature. As such it has come down to
us. It is eminently human in every way, and while there is here and
there an unfortunate tendency to repeat words of similar sound and
different meaning, after the fashion of what we call punning, this is
pardonable enough since so many of our friends indulge in it and give
us practice in pardoning, while, on the whole, the old man wrote as
wisely as Polonius, and in a style not quite as artificial as that
which Shakespeare has invented as suitable to the old Danish Prime
Minister, whom the ancient vizier of Egypt recalls so vividly in many
ways.

No idea is probably more ingrained in modern thinking, no opinion is
more generally accepted, no conclusion is surer to most people, than
that we are in the midst of marvellous progress in this little world
of ours, and that our generation is somewhere at the apex of the
Pyramid of Progress, elevated thereto by the attainments of the
generations that have preceded us. As the Poet Laureate put it at the
close of the nineteenth century, "we are the heirs of all the ages in
the {13} foremost files of time"; and because we have the advantage of
our predecessors' progress in their time, we are, of course, in all
that makes for human happiness and fulness of life, very far ahead of
those gone before us. The farther back we go in history, then, the
lower down men are supposed to be found in all that stands for
intellectuality and in all that represents the possibilities of human
achievement at its best. It is now well understood that the
generations of the past are not so much to be blamed for their
backwardness as to be pitied for the misfortune that, having come
earlier in the world's history, they could not have the advantages
that we enjoy, and therefore could only attain much lower stages in
human progress than ours.

Apparently, there are very few people who do not share in the opinions
thus expressed. The nineteenth century has been proclaimed the century
of evolution; and the idea of evolution has become so much a part of
the thought of our time that man also is assumed to be in the midst of
it, and history is presumed to show distinctly the wonderful advance
that humanity has made. As a matter of fact, it is extremely difficult
to point out definitely where progress in humanity may be observed.
Ambassador Bryce was asked, two years ago, to deliver an address
before Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, and took for his subject "What is
Progress?" Phi Beta Kappa is the fraternity that admits into its
classes only the best {14} students,--men who have proved their
ability by success. Mr. Bryce, speaking to the most intelligent
university graduates, might be expected to make much of our wonderful
recent progress. The address subsequently appeared in the _Atlantic
Monthly_ for August, 1907. Far from any glorification of progress, the
historian of the American Commonwealth, who has demonstrated his
breadth of view and his notable lack of British insularity by the
large way he has written about us, so that we have adopted his work as
a text-book of information about ourselves, is very dubious as to
whether there is any progress in the world. There is certainly no
progress in man's highest expressions of his intelligence. As Mr.
Bryce says: "The poetry of the early Hebrews and of the early Greeks
has never been surpassed and hardly ever equalled. Neither has the
philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, nor the speeches of Demosthenes and
Cicero." No one pretends that there is any progress in art. The
masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, and painting date as a rule
from long before our time, some of them nearly twenty-five hundred
years back.

As has been very well said, the man who talks much about progress in
our time usually knows only the history of human thought in his own
generation, and not very much about that. In nearly every important
phase of human achievement, we are, in present accomplishment, far
behind the great predecessors. In our generation, {15} we are
confessedly imitators in every phase of aesthetic expression. In
painting, sculpture, art and literature, our models are all in the
past, and we are quite frank in confessing that we are doing no work
at all so good as the work of our forefathers of many generations and
sometimes many centuries ago. Whence, then, comes the idea of
progress? It has obtained most of its vogue from the theory of
evolution; and the lack of evidence for evolution in general, in spite
of the persuasion on the part of many educated people that there are
proofs for it, can be very well judged from the corresponding lack of
evidence with regard to progress in humanity. There is complete
absence of proof for this latter, when the situation with regard to
human achievement in the really great things of human life is
examined. Indeed, it would be amusing were it not amazing to think how
readily we have come to accept notions for which there is so little
substantiation. To many this will doubtless seem a surprising
declaration to make, after all that has been written, and universally
accepted as most people think, with regard to evolution by the great
minds of the nineteenth century. What evolution means, however, is
summed up in the theory of descent, that is that living things as we
know them now, have all come from simpler forms and perhaps all from a
single form. The only other phase of interest in evolution is what
concerns the theory of natural selection, which is supposed by many
people to {16} have been demonstrated in the nineteenth century. It
may be well for those who think thus to have recalled to them what a
recent writer on the subject, himself a distinguished investigator in
biology, a professor at Leland Stanford University, where under the
influence of President Jordan biology is thoroughly yet conservatively
cultivated, has to say with regard to these theories and the objective
evidence for them. Professor Vernon L. Kellogg in his "Darwinism
To-day," [Footnote 2] p. 18, though himself an evolutionist and a
Darwinian, says: "What may for the moment detain us, however, is a
reference to the curiously almost completely subjective character of
the evidence for both the theory of descent and natural selection.
Biology has been until now a science of observation; it is beginning
to be one of observation plus experiment. The evidence for its
principal theories might be expected to be thoroughly objective in
character; to be of the nature of positive, observed and perhaps
experimentally proved, facts. How is it actually? Speaking by and
large, we only tell the general truth when we declare that _no
indubitable cases of species forming or transforming, that is of
descent, have been observed; and that no recognized case of natural
selection really selecting has been observed._ I hasten to repeat the
names of the Ancon sheep, the Paraguay cattle, the Porto Santo rabbit,
the Artemias of Schmankewitch and the de Vriesian {17} evening
primroses to show that I know my list of classic possible exceptions
to this denial of observed species forming, and to refer to Weldon's
broad-and-narrow fronted crabs as a case of what may be an observation
of selection at work. _But such a list, even if it could be extended
to a score, or to a hundred, of cases, is ludicrous as objective proof
of that descent and selection, under whose domination the forming of
millions of species is supposed to have occurred."_ (Italics mine.)

  [Footnote 2: Henry Holt and Co., New York, 1907.]

Mr. Kellogg, as might be expected from this, objects very much to the
application that has been so heedlessly made of certain supposed
principles of evolution to pedagogy. In practically every science to
which Darwinian principles have been applied it is the weakest of the
principles that have been appealed to as the foundation for presumedly
new developments in the particular science. With regard to the
so-called science of education Professor Kellogg says:

  "In Pedagogy it is also the theory of descent rather than the
  selection theory which has been drawn on for some rather remarkable
  developments in child study and instruction. Unfortunately it is on
  that weakest of the three foundation pillars of descent, namely the
  science of embryology with its Muellerian-Haeckelian capitulation
  theory or biogenetic law, that the child-study pedagogues have
  builded. The species recapitulates in the ontogeny (development) of
  each of its individuals the course or history of its {18} phylogeny
  (descent or evolution). Hence the child corresponds in different
  periods of its development to the phyletic stages in the descent of
  man. As the child is fortunately well by its fish, dog and monkey
  stages before it comes into the care of the pedagogue, he has to
  concern himself only with safe progress through the various stages
  of prehistoric and barbarous man. Detect the precise phyletic stage
  cave-man, stone-age man, hunter and roamer, pastoral man,
  agriculturalist, and treat with the little barbarian accordingly!
  What simplicity! Only one trouble here for the pedagogue: _the
  recapitulation theory is mostly wrong and what is right in it is
  mostly so covered up by the wrong part, that few biologists longer
  have any confidence in discovering the right._ What, then, of our
  generalizing friends, the pedagogues?"

It is in educational matters, above all, then, that we must be careful
about assumptions with regard to evolution and supposed inevitable
progress because we must, forsooth, be taking advantage of the
accumulated experience of previous generations. There is no
inevitability about progress in any line. The attainment of any
generation depends absolutely on what that generation tries to do, the
ideals that it has and the fidelity with which it sets itself to work.
We can make just as egregious mistakes, and we have made them, as any
generation of the past. We can foster delusions with regard to our
all-knowingness just as {19} many another foolish people before us
have done, and our one hope of real accomplishment for ourselves and
our generation is to choose our purposes carefully and then set about
their accomplishment with strenuous effort. The lessons of the past in
history are extremely precious not only because they show us where
others made mistakes but also because they show us the successes of
the past. The better we know these, the deeper our admiration for
them, the better the outlook for ourselves and our accomplishment.
This is the ideal that I would like to emphasize in this series of
lectures and addresses and in this, far from there being any
pessimism, there is, as it seems to me, the highest optimism. Any
generation that wants to can do well, but it must want to do
efficaciously.

Any one who thinks that education, in the sense of training of
character or advice with regard to practical, every-day life, has
evoluted in the course of time, should read this little book that I
bring to you this evening. Indeed, it is as the first chapter in the
history of education that it finds its most valuable place in
literature. This teacher of the old-time, who had his boy's best
interest at heart, not only knew what to say but how to say it so as
to attract a young man's attention. Of course it is probable that,
even with all this good advice, the young man went his way in his own
fashion; for that is ever the mode of the young. But, so far as the
experience of another {20} could supply for that personal experience
which every human being craves, and will have, no matter what the
cost, surely this oldest book in the world supplies the best possible
material. As literature, it has a finish that is quite surprising. Art
is said to be the elimination of the superfluous. Surely, then, this
is artful, in the best sense of that word, to a supreme degree. It is
surprising how few repetitions there are, how few tergiversations, how
few unnecessary words; and yet the style is not so austere as to be
dry and lacking in human interest.

Probably the most interesting feature of the book is the fact that in
it God is always spoken of in the singular. It is not the "gods" who
help men, who punish them, who command and must be obeyed, whose
providence is so wonderful, but it is always "God." The latest
editor,[Footnote 3] Mr. Battiscombe G. Gunn, in his version always
inserts the definite article before the word God because, he says, in
different places there were different local gods, and the idea of the
writer was to emphasize the fact that the god of any particular
locality would act as he declared in his instructions. There are many
distinguished Egyptologists, however, who insist that the expression
"the God," which occurs not only in this but in many other very early
Egyptian writings, is a {21} monotheistic deity whose name is above
all names, and transcends all the power of humanity to name him, and
hence is spoken of always without a name but with the definite
article.

  [Footnote 3: "The Instructions of Ptah Hotep." Translated from the
  Egyptian, with an Introduction and an Appendix, by Battiscombe G.
  Gunn. E. P. Dutton & Co. Wisdom of the East Series, 1909.]

It is curious indeed to find that the very first bit of instruction
given to his son by this wise father is, not to be conceited about
what he knows. How striking the expression of his first sentence of
this oldest book: "Be not proud because thou art learned." And the
second is like unto the first: "But discourse with the ignorant man as
with the sage." And then at the end of this very first paragraph comes
the first figure of speech in human literature that has been presented
for us. It is as beautiful in its simplicity and illuminating quality
as any of the subsequent time. "Fair speech" (by which is meant
evidently kindly speech toward those who know less than we do) "is
more rare than the emerald that is found by slave maidens on the
pebbles." Then there comes a series of directions as to how the young
man should treat his superiors, his equals and his inferiors. If in
argument he is worsted by some one who knows more than himself, he is
cautioned. "Be not angry." If some one talks nonsense. "Correct him."
If an ignorant man insists on arguing, "Be not scornful with him, but
let him alone; then shall he confound himself"; for "it is shameful to
confuse a mean mind."

The advice may be summed up. Do not argue with your superiors, it does
no good; nor with {22} your equals, state your case and let it go; but
above all, not with your inferiors; let them talk and they will make
fools of themselves.

Kindness is always insisted on as the quality most indispensable to a
man. "Live therefore," says the father, "in the house of kindliness,
and men shall come and give gifts of themselves." There are lessons in
politeness as well as in kindliness. For instance: "If thou be among
the guests of a great man, pierce him not with many glances. It is
abhorred of the soul to stare at him. Speak not till he address thee.
Speak when he questioneth thee; so shalt thou be good in his opinion."
Again, he wants his son not to eat the bread of idleness: "Fill not
thy mouth at thy neighbor's table." He insists much on the lesson that
God helps those who help themselves. "Behold," he says, "riches come
not of themselves. It is their rule to come to him that actively
desires. If he bestir him and collect them himself, God shall make him
prosperous; but He shall punish him if he be slothful." On the other
hand, the gaining of riches for riches' sake is not worth the while.
"When riches are gained, follow the heart; for riches are of no avail
if one be weary." As much as to say, after having gained a competency,
do not spend further time in amassing wealth, but enjoy in a
reasonable way that which has been obtained.

There are certain things, however, that a man should not follow; they
are unworthy of his {23} nature as a man. "As to the man whose heart
obeyeth his belly, he causeth disgust in place of love. His heart is
wretched, his body is gross. He is insolent toward those endowed by
God. He that obeyeth his belly hath an enemy." While the old man warns
his son against gluttony and against sloth, he has much to say with
regard to covetousness: "If thou desire that thine actions may be
good, save thyself from all malice, and beware of the quality of
covetousness, which is a grievous inner malady." This expression is
rendered still more striking by what is added to it; for the father
insists that it is particularly relatives-in-law who quarrel over
money. "Covetousness setteth at variance fathers-in-law and the
kinsmen of the daughter-in-law. It sundereth the wife and the husband;
it gathereth unto itself all evils. It is the girdle of all
wickedness." It needed only the next sentence to make these
expressions supremely modern: "Be not covetous as touching shares, in
seizing that which is not thine own property."

The God of this earliest book that we have from the hand of man has
nearly all the interesting and important qualities that we refer to
the Deity. He is looked up to as the giver of all good things. He
loves his creation, and above all loves man, and observes men's
actions very carefully, and rewards or punishes them according to
their deserts. He desires men to be fruitful, and to multiply upon the
earth for their own good and {24} for his glory. Nothing unworthy of
the Deity, as he is known by the most educated people, is attributed
to this God, who transcends a personal name. There is an utter
disregard of all trivial mythology and of all mysterious riddles,
though these trimmings of truth are to be found constantly in other
Egyptian works of later date. Indeed, the picture of God is as
striking a presentation of the fatherliness and the providence of the
Almighty and of most of the lovable characteristics of the Deity as
there is to be found anywhere in literature until the coming of the
Saviour.

One might think that after having warned his son about most of the
Seven Deadly Sins as we know them--pride, covetousness, gluttony,
envy, sloth and anger,--at least we should not find lust touched on in
the modern way. There is, however, in this matter an extremely chaste
bit of advice that sums up the whole situation as well as a father can
tell his son. The writer says: "No place prospereth wherein lust is
allowed to work its way. A thousand men have been ruined for the
pleasure of a little time short as a dream. Even death is reached
thereby. It is a wretched thing. As for the lustful liver, every one
leaveth him for what he doeth; he is avoided. If his desires be not
gratified, he regardeth no laws."

The father tells his son, straightforwardly and emphatically, that
indulgence in this vice inevitably leads to loss of friends, of
health, of {25} everything that the world holds good; and that once a
man has started down this path he has no regard for law or order or
decency or self-respect. This eighteenth paragraph on a thorny subject
is probably one of the most wonderful passages in this advice of a
father to his son. Fathers of the modern time ask what shall they say
to their boys. Here is something to tell them that does not excite
pruriency, that does set the full state of the case before them and
represents probably all that can be said with assurance and safety.

In recent years we have heard much of moral and social prophylaxis and
the necessity for giving precious information with regard to this
subject that may prove helpful to young people. Most people are sure
to think that this is the first time in the history of the race that
there has been an awakening to the necessity for this. Of course there
is no doubt that owing to delayed marriages and unfortunate social
conditions in our large cities we have more need of it than past
generations, yet here in this old schoolbook from Egypt we have very
definite and very wise teaching in the matter. A physician is prone to
wonder what did the old man mean by "a thousand men have been ruined
for the pleasure of a little time short as a dream. Even death is
reached thereby." Is it possible that he knew something of the
physical, or let us rather say, the pathological dangers of the vice?
In the discussion of the pictures of old-time surgery in {26} _The
Journal of the American Medical Association_ I suggested that these
generations seem to have known more about this phase of pathology than
we are inclined to admit.

On the other hand, the father emphatically warns his son that his
happiness will depend on loving his wife and caring for her to the
best of his ability; though some of the details of that advice are so
naively modern in their expression that it seems almost impossible to
believe that they should have been spoken nearly six thousand years
ago. He says: "If thou would be wise, provide for thine house, and
love thy wife. Give her what she wants to eat, get her what she wants
to wear [literally, fill her stomach, clothe her back]. Gladden her
heart during thy lifetime, for she is an estate profitable unto its
lord. Be not harsh, for gentleness mastereth her more than strength."

There is a variant translation of this passage quoted in Maspero's
"The Dawn of Civilization," which brings out even more clearly the
ideas that seem most modern, and which makes it very sure that it is
not the translator who has found in vague old expressions thoughts
that, when put into modern words, have modernized old ideas. Maspero
reads: "If thou art wise, thou wilt go up into thine house and love
thy wife at home; thou wilt give her abundance of food; thou wilt
clothe her back with garments; all that covers her limbs, her
perfumes, are the joy of her life. As {27} long as thou lookest to
this, she is as a profitable field to her lord [master]."

The old gentleman's idea evidently was that, looked at merely from a
material standpoint, it was worth a man's while to spend as much time
caring for his wife as for his estate. She meant just as much for his
happiness in the end and might mean probably more for his unhappiness.
It is a very practical way of looking at the subject and perhaps the
romancists might think it sordid. It must not be forgotten, however,
that this is only the secondary motive suggested. At the beginning he
commands him to love his wife for her own sake, and then, after
suggesting the material benefit that comes from caring for her, he
says that "gentleness mastereth her more than strength."

Immediately after this valuable advice with regard to the care of the
principal member of his household the old man turns to the question of
the care of his servants. We are surely prone to think that the
servant problem at least is a new development in this little world of
ours. Many literary works serve to foster the impression that in the
old days servants were easy to obtain, that they were always
respectful, that they could readily be managed and life with them was,
if not one sweet song, at least a very smooth course. Men, however,
have always been men, and women and even servants have always had
minds of their own, and strange as it may seem to us there has always
{28} been a servant problem and there was one in Egypt 5,500 years
ago.

Ptah Hotep said: "Satisfy thine hired servants out of such things as
thou hast; it is the duty of one that hath been favored of God. In
sooth, it is hard to satisfy hired servants. For one saith, 'he is a
lavish person; one knoweth not that which may come from him.' But on
the morrow he thinketh, 'he is a person of exactitude (parsimony),
content therein.' _And when favors have been shown unto servants, they
say 'we go.'_ (Italics mine.) Peace dwelleth not in that town wherein
dwell servants that are wretched."

A difficult problem; presents will not solve it but only complicate
it, exact justice is necessary, but the peace that follows is worth
the trouble it entails. The principle would be valuable in many a
squabble of corporate employer and hosts of servants in the modern
time.

For domestic happiness, it needed only the advice given a little later
in this instruction: "Let thy face be bright what time thou livest.
Bread is to be shared. He that is grasping in entertainment himself
shall have an empty belly. He that causeth strife cometh himself to
sorrow. Take not such a one for thy companion. It is a man's kindly
acts that are remembered of him in the years after his life."

There is one phase of life in which Ptah Hotep differs entirely from
the present generation,--at least if we are to judge the present
generation {29} from its results in this matter. Of course there are
many of us who consider that, in spite of six thousand years of
distance in time, the old Egyptian prime minister is far ahead of our
contemporaries in this important subject. He thought that obedience
was the most important thing in life. For him independence of spirit,
in a young person particularly, was an abomination. In spite of the
tendency to loquacity and to repeat itself, often said to be so
characteristic of old age, the father, who in all his instructions has
never sinned against this literary canon, almost seems to do so when
it comes to the question of obedience. Over and over again he insists
that obedience is the one quality that must characterize a man if he
is to get on in life, and if he is to secure happiness, and have a
happy generation of his own group around him. The sentences read more
like a Kempis or some mediaeval writer on spirituality, and seem meant
for monks under obedience rather than for a young man of the world,
the son of a prime minister, just about to enter on his life work in
business and politics. Two of the paragraphs are well worth quoting
here:

  "A splendid thing is the obedience of an obedient son; he cometh in
  and listeneth obediently. Excellent in hearing, excellent in
  speaking, is every man that obeyeth what is noble. The obedience of
  an obeyer is a noble thing. Obedience is better than all things that
  are; it maketh good will. How good it is that a son should take {30}
  that from his father by which he hath reached old age [obedience]!
  That which is desired by the God is obedience; disobedience is
  abhorred of the God. Verily, it is the heart that maketh its master
  to obey or to disobey; for the safe-and-sound life of a man is his
  heart. It is the obedient man that obeyeth what is said; he that
  loveth to obey, the same shall carry out commands. He that obeyeth
  becometh one obeyed. It is good indeed when a son obeyeth his
  father; and he (his father) that hath spoken hath great joy of it.
  Such a son shall be mild as a master, and he that heareth him shall
  obey him that hath spoken. He shall be comely in body and honored by
  his father. His memory shall be in the mouths of the living, those
  upon earth, as long as they exist.

  "As for the fool, devoid of obedience, he doeth nothing. Knowledge
  he regardeth as ignorance, profitable things as hurtful things. He
  doeth all kind of errors, so that he is rebuked therefor every day.
  He liveth in death therewith. It is his food. At chattering speech
  he marvelleth, as at the wisdom of princes, living in death every
  day. He is shunned because of his misfortunes, by reason of the
  multitude of afflictions that cometh upon him every day."

Of one thing the old prime minister was especially sure. It was that
employment at no single occupation, no matter what it was or how
interesting soever it might be, could satisfy a man or even keep him
in good health. He felt, {31} probably by experience, the necessity
for diversity of mind and of occupation, if there was to be any
happiness or any real success in life. He has a quiet way of putting
it, but he says, as confidently as the most modern of pedagogues, that
all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and all play and no work
makes it impossible for Jack to get on. But a proper mixture of both
makes life livable; and if a man has only the work that he cares for,
and can get some of his pleasure in life out of his work, then is all
well. "One that reckoneth accounts all the day passeth not an happy
moment. One that gladdeneth his heart all the day provideth not for
his house. The bowman hitteth the mark, as the steersman reacheth
land, by diversity of aim. He that obeyeth his heart shall command."

There are some conclusions in the philosophy of life that we are very
much inclined to think are the products of modern practical wisdom,
and it is rather surprising to find them stated plainly in this
old-time advice of the father to his boy. If there is one idea more
than another that we are confident is modern, and are almost sure to
attribute to the social development of our own generation, it is that
riches do not belong to the man who makes them to be used for his own
purpose alone, but their possession is justified only if he uses them
for the benefit of the community. This is so up-to-date an idea indeed
that it is startling to find it expressed in all its {32} completeness
in this oldest of books. Ptah Hotep said: "If thou be great after
being of no account, and hast gotten riches after poverty, being
foremost in these in the city, and hast knowledge concerning useful
matters so that promotion is come unto thee, then swathe not thine
heart in thine hoard, for thou art become the steward of the
endowments [of God]. Thou art not the last; another shall be thine
equal, and to him shall come the like [fortune and station]."

After all this it may be necessary to trace the pedigree of the book,
since it might seem to be possible that it was a modern invention. The
original of it is the so-called "Prisse Papyrus," which is well known
by name to all students of archaeology and especially of Egyptology,
and the contents of which are familiar to all who are acquainted with
Egyptian history and literature. It appears to have been found at
Thebes, but the exact place is not known. M. Prisse d'Avennes, the
well-known French archaeologist after whom it is named, is said to
have bought it from one of the Egyptian native workmen, or _fellahin,_
whom he had hired to make excavations in the tombs of Thebes.
Egyptologists generally have accepted the idea that it was actually
taken by this workman from the tomb of one of the Kings Entef, who
were of the Eleventh Dynasty and reigned about 3000 B.C. This is not
certain, however. After publishing a translation in 1847, M. Prisse
presented the precious papyrus to the {33} Bibliotheque Royale (now
Nationale). There it may still be seen. Spread out flat, it measures
about twenty-four feet in length and six inches in width. There are
about eighteen pages of clear red and black writing in the Hieratic
character.

The first part of this manuscript is a portion of another book, the
so-called "Instructions of Ke'gemni." [Footnote 4] This is, however,
only a short fragment, though probably of even older date than the
"Instructions of Ptah Hotep." This work we have in its entirety.
Doubtless its preservation was due to the fact that many copies of it
had been made, though only two have come down to us.

  [Footnote 4: These Egyptian names are spelled differently by
  different modern scholars, according to their idea of the value of
  certain sounds of the older language as they should be expressed in
  the modern tongue to which they are most familiar. Many English
  scholars spell this as I have done, Ke'gemni. Maspero, however, and
  most of the French scholars, spell it Qaqimni. Maspero prefers the
  form Phtah-Hotpu to that of Ptah Hotep, which has been adopted by
  English scholars.]

There is a second manuscript of the "Instructions of Ptah Hotep,"--or
the "Proverbs of Phtahhotpu," as the book is called by Maspero. This
was discovered not long ago in the British Museum, by Mr. Griffith;
and, while it is not so complete as the French copy, there is such an
agreement between the two manuscripts that there is no doubt about the
authenticity of the book and of the fact that it represents the oldest
book in the world.

Its date would be about 3650 B.C. if we were {34} to follow,--as does
the translator of the most easily procurable English edition, Mr.
Gunn,--the chronology of Flinders Petrie. Recent advances in our
knowledge of Egyptology, however, have brought the dates nearer to us
than they were placed before. Such men as Breasted of Chicago, and
Maspero, would probably take from three hundred to five hundred years
from this date. There is a definite tendency in all the histories to
bring dates much nearer to the present than before. For a time, the
older one could place a date the more scholarly seemed to be the
appeal of such an opinion. Now the tendency is all the other way. Even
the latest date that can be given for Ptah Hotep, or Phtahhotpu, would
still make his little book the oldest book in the world, however.

Fortunately for us the manuscripts of the instructions of Ptah Hotep
that have come down to us are in much better condition than those of
most of the other instructions of similar kinds formerly used in the
schools that have been preserved. In some of these there are a great
many errors of writing, spelling and grammar with the corrections of
the master above in a different-colored ink. Verily, education has not
changed much in spite of six millenniums, or very nearly so, of
supposed progress since these were written, for the whole process is
as familiar as it can be. As Mr. Battiscombe Gunn says in his
Introduction to his edition "a schoolboy's scrawl over 3,000 years
{35} old is no easy thing to translate." We would seem, however, to
have been blessed in the preservation of this oldest book in the
world, either of the original copies set by the masters or of such
copies as were made by advanced students. The series of lucky chances
that have combined to bring to us, in the comparatively perfect form
in which it exists, this oldest book in the world is interesting to
contemplate. Without them we would have no idea of how closely the
first people of whom we have any definite records in history resembled
us in every essential quality of humanity, even to the ways and modes
by which they tried to lift humanity out of the barbaric selfishness
inherent in it to what is higher and nobler in its nature.

With this surprising resurrection of our school-teaching methods from
the past it is interesting to study other phases of the education of
these early times, and at the same time to note the accomplishments of
the men, of the period, their tastes, the state of their culture as
regards the arts and crafts and personal adornment and the decoration
of their houses and buildings of various kinds. Flinders Petrie, the
distinguished English Egyptologist, in an article on "The Romance of
Early Civilization," printed recently in _The Independent_ (New York),
said:

  "We have now before us a view of the powers of man at the earliest
  point to which we can trace written history, and what strikes us
  most is how very little his nature or abilities have changed in {36}
  seven thousand years; what he admired we admire; what were his
  limits in fine handiwork are also ours. We may have a wider outlook,
  a greater understanding of things, our interests may have extended
  in this interval; but as far as human nature and tastes go, man is
  essentially unchanged in this interval."

We have enough of the products of the arts and crafts of these early
Egyptian generations to show us that there must have been no
inconsiderable training of the men of this time in the making of
beautiful art objects. For instance, the interior decoration of their
tombs shows us men skilled as designers, clever in the use of colors,
with a rather extensive knowledge of pigments and with a definite
tendency not to repeat designs but to create new ones. Most of the
diapered designs of modern interior decorations were original with the
Egyptians, and some of those found in the tombs uncovered in recent
years have been adopted and adapted by modern designers. It is in the
matter of jewelry particularly that the ability and the training of
the old Egyptian workmen are most evident. It would be quite
incredible to think that these workmen developed their artistic
craftsmanship without training, and therefore there was at least the
germ of a technical school or set of schools in oldest Egypt. It would
be quite impossible to believe this only that we know so much more
about other features of Egyptian education as anticipations of our
own. {37} A special word about their jewelry then, because it
illustrates a definite training quite different from that of our time,
will not be out of place.

Their jewelry, it may be said at once, is in striking contrast with
what we call jewelry in our time. It is true that we are in the midst
of one of the worst periods of jewelry-making, but then we are so
prone to think of anything very modern as representing the highest
evolution, that the contrast is chastening and illuminating. Mr.
Petrie has insisted on the beautiful jewelry, carved precious stones
and gold ornaments of the very early period in Egypt. In our time we
have no jewelry that deserves the name. I doubt whether we even know
the real definition of jewelry, so I venture to repeat it. Jewels are
precious stones themselves of value, usually of a high degree of
hardness so that they do not deteriorate with time or wear, to which a
greatly enhanced value is added by the handiwork of man. Jewels are
made by artistic carving and cutting so that besides their precious
quality as beautiful colored stones, they have an added charm and
interest from human workmanship. We wear no such jewelry in our
generation. What we have are merely precious stones. These by an
artificial rigging of the market and a combination of the great
commercial agencies that control the sale of diamonds and other
precious stones, remain very expensive in spite of their comparative
abundance. They are worn only because they are a display of the {38}
amount of money that a person can afford to spend for mere ornaments.

There is nothing in these precious stones themselves that carries an
appeal to the educated mind. It is true that they are pretty, but only
with the prettiness of the play of rainbow colors that delights a
childish or uncultured eye. It requires no taste to like them, no
culture to appreciate them, and their cost alone gives them value.
This is so true that those who possess a magnificent _parure_ of
diamonds often also have an imitation of them in cheaper stones that
may be worn on most occasions. The danger of loss or the risk of
robbery is so great that it has seemed worth while to have this
imitation made in many cases. No one except an expert will recognize
the difference, and if you are known to possess the real stones it
will of course be supposed that you are wearing them. What gives them
value as an adornment in the eye of the possessor, and presumably also
of the onlookers, is the fact that they must have cost such a large
sum of money. They are a vulgar display of wealth. They are typically
barbaric and, worn in the profusion now so common, carry us back to
the uncultured peoples who like to wear gaudy things. The taste is
perhaps a little better, but the essential quality of mind that
dictates the wearing of heavy brass rings and strings of beads and
that which impels to the display of many diamonds, is hard to
differentiate.

Artistic objects produce a sense of pleasure in {39} the beholder, an
appreciation of the beautiful handiwork of man. Precious stones worn
as is now the custom produce only a sense of envy. Of course envy
comes only to baser minds, but it is perfectly clear that most of
those who are supposed to be affected by the sight of diamonds worn in
profusion have this particular quality rather well developed. This
distinction is often forgotten. Personal adornment as well as the
adornment of one's house should be in order to give pleasure to
others, and not merely a display of wealth for wealth's sake in such a
way as is likely to produce envy. The old Egyptians made their jewelry
with the true artistic sense. Flinders Petrie has told how beautifully
they carved hard gems of various kinds and how the remains of these
show us a people of good taste, even though their technique in the
manufacture of such objects may have left something to be desired. In
connection with this oldest of books it is important to recall this,
for it shows that not alone in the applied wisdom of life and the
knowledge gained from personal experience were these Egyptians of over
5,000 years ago brothers and sisters beyond whose wise saws we have
not advanced, but also in the realm of art their work takes its place
beside what is best in the modern time.

Some may be inclined to say that while the Egyptians may, as indeed we
must admit they did, know many things about art and literature and
practical wisdom, yet they did not have exact {40} knowledge. Their
knowledge, though large and liberal, had not become scientific. This
will scarcely be maintained, however, by any one who realizes how much
of applied science there was in the building of the old temples and
pyramids and how much they must have developed mechanics, applied and
theoretic, in order to accomplish the tasks they thus set themselves.
Cantor, the German historian of mathematics, acknowledged this and
paid a worthy tribute to the old Egyptians' development of
mathematics, pure and applied, in discussing the expression that had
been used by Democritus, the early Greek geometer, who once declared
that "In the construction of plane figures with demonstrations no one
has yet surpassed me, not even the rope fasteners (harpedonaptai) of
Egypt." For a long time this word harpedonaptai was a mystery, but
Professor Cantor cleared it up, and explaining for us the exact
meaning of the compound which means literally either rope fasteners or
rope stretchers, he says, "There is no doubt that the Egyptians were
very careful about the exact orientations of their temples and other
public buildings. Old inscriptions seem to show that only the North
and South lines were drawn by actual observation of the stars. The
East and West lines were drawn at right angles to the others. Now it
appears from the practice of Heron of Alexandria and of the ancient
Indian and probably also the Chinese geometers, that a common method
of {41} securing a right angle between two very long lines was to
stretch round three pegs a rope measured in three portions which were
to one another in the ratio 3:4:5. The triangle thus formed is
right-angled. Further the operation of rope stretching is mentioned in
Egypt, without explanation, at an extremely early time (Amenemhat I).
If this be the correct explanation of it, then the Egyptians were
acquainted 2,000 years B.C., with a particular case of the proposition
now known as the Pythagorean theorem."

This may not seem to mean very much. Yet what it illustrates is just
this. These men wanted a certain development of mathematics. They
needed it for the work that they were engaged at. They set themselves
to the solution of certain problems and in doing so evolved a theorem
in pure mathematics and an application of it which greatly simplified
construction and gave an impetus to mechanics. In so doing they
anticipated the work of a long after time. This is what I would insist
is always true with regard to man. When he needs some intellectual
development he makes it. When he requires an application of it he
succeeds in working it out. Later ages may go farther, but had he
needed further developments he evidently had the power to make them
and probably would have made them.

The old Greeks had a much better opportunity to study Egyptian remains
than we have, and especially was this true after the foundation of
{42} Alexandria. There must have been a lively interest in things
Egyptian aroused in the Greek minds by this Greek settlement in old
Egypt. It is not surprising, then, to find some magnificent
compliments to the old Egyptians in the mouths of some of the writers
about the time of the foundation of Alexandria. Eudemus, for instance,
the pupil of Aristotle, wrote the history of Geometry in which he
traces its invention to the Egyptians, and states that the reason for
its invention was its necessity in the remeasurement of land demanded
after the removal of landmarks by the annual rise of the Nile. Always
does one find this, that when there is a serious demand for an
invention in theory or practice men make it. It is not a change or
development in man that brings about inventions, but a change in his
environment which causes new necessities to arise, and then he
proceeds with an ability always the same to respond properly to those
necessities.

Eudemus says: "Geometry is said by many to have been invented among
the Egyptians, its origin being due to the measurement of plots of
land. This was necessary there because of the rising of the Nile,
which obliterated the boundaries appertaining to separate owners. Nor
is it marvellous that the discovery of this and other sciences should
have arisen from such an occasion, since everything which moves in
development will advance from the imperfect to the {43} perfect. From
mere sense-perception to calculation, and from this to reasoning, is a
natural transition."

The old Egyptians made some fine developments of arithmetic. These
were afterwards lost and were reinvented probably several times. I
have already quoted from Cantor the opinion that the Egyptians were
familiar with the properties of the right triangle whose sides were in
the ratio 3:4:5 over 4,000 years ago. In the _Papyrus_ of Ahmes, whose
contents probably come from before 2400 B.C., there are the solutions
of many problems which show how far the Egyptians had gone in
arithmetical calculations. For instance, there are methods of
calculating the solid contents of barns. The solutions are not
absolute but are very closely approximate. Ahmes has problems that
were solved in connection with the pyramids, which make it very clear
that the old Egyptians had more than a little knowledge of the
principles of proportion, of certain geometrical figures and probably
were familiar also with the simpler phases at least of trigonometry.
The area of a circle is found in Ahmes by deducting from the diameter
one-ninth and squaring the remainder, which gives a value for the
ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle much more
nearly correct than that used by most writers until comparatively
recent times.

As a teacher of the history of medicine with certain administrative
functions in a medical {44} school, I have been very much interested
in the old-time medicine and above all the details of medical
education that we find among the Egyptians. Ordinarily it would be
assumed that there was so little of anything like medical education
that it could be scarcely worth while talking about it. On the
contrary, we find so much that is being constantly added to by
discoverers, that it is a never-ending source of surprise. There is a
well-grounded tradition founded on inscriptions that Athothis, the son
of Menes, one of the early kings, wrote a work on anatomy. This king
is said to have died about 4150 B.C. There are traces of the existence
of hospitals at that time in which diseases were studied and medical
attendants trained. Even earlier than this there was a great
physician, the first physician of whom we have record in history,
whose name was I-Em-Hetep, which means "the Bringer of Peace." He had
two other titles, one of which was "the Master of Secrets," partly
because he possessed the secrets of health and disease, very probably
also because so many things had to be confided to him as a physician.
Another of his titles was that of "The Scribe of Numbers," in
reference, doubtless, to the fact that he had to use numbers so
carefully in making out his prescriptions.

His first title, that of the bringer of peace, shows that very early
in the history of medicine it was recognized that the physician's
first duty was to bring peace of mind to his patients. A {45}
distinguished French physician (Director) of the department of
physiology of the University of Paris, Professor Richet, said not long
since, that physicians can seldom cure, they can often relieve, but
they can always console, and evidently this oldest physician took his
duty of consolation seriously and successfully. He lived in the reign
of King Tehser, a monarch of the Third Dynasty in Egypt, who reigned
about 4500 B.C. or a little later. How much this first physician was
thought of will be best appreciated from the fact that the well-known
step pyramid at Sakkara, the old cemetery near Memphis, is called by
his name. So great indeed was the honor paid to him that after his
death he was worshipped as a god, and so we have statues of him seated
with a scroll on his knees, with an air of benignant knowledge, a
placid-looking man with a certain divine expression of sympathy well
suited to his name, the bringer of peace. While they raised him to
their altars he does not wear a beard as did all their gods and their
kings when they were raised to the godly dignity, but evidently they
felt that his humanity was of supreme interest to them.

There is another monument at Sakkara that is of special interest to us
in its consideration of old-time medicine. I discussed it and its
inscriptions in the _Journal of the American Medical Association_
(Nov. 8, 1907). It is the tomb of a surgeon, decorated within with
pictures of surgical operations. The grandeur of the tomb and its {46}
location show us that the surgeon must have held a very prominent
place in the community of that time. The date of this tomb is not
later than 2500 B.C. Certain of the surgical operations resembled
those done at the present time. There is the opening of a carbuncle at
the back of the neck which shows how old are men's diseases and the
modes of their treatment. After this the oldest monument in the
history of medicine is documentary, the Ebers Papyrus, the writing of
which is probably not much later than 1700 B.C. This consists,
moreover, of a collection of older texts and suggestions in medicine,
and some of the idioms are said to belong to several distant periods.
It is probable that certain portions of this papyrus were composed not
much later than the oldest book in the world, and that they date from
nearly 3000 B.C. This papyrus is as interesting and as startling in
its anticipation of some of our modern medical wisdom as is the
Instruction of Ptah Hotep in the practical wisdom of life. This seems
a good deal to say, but there is ample evidence for it.

According to Dr. Carl von Klein, who discussed the "Medical Features
of the Ebers Papyrus" in some detail in the _Journal of the American
Medical Association_ about five years ago, over 700 different
substances are mentioned as of remedial value in this old-time medical
work. There is scarcely a disease of any important organ with which we
are familiar in the modern {47} time that is not mentioned here. While
the significance of diseases of such organs as the spleen, the
ductless glands, and the appendix was of course missed, nearly every
other pathological condition was either expressly named or at least
hinted at. The papyrus insists very much on the value of
history-taking in medicine, and hints that the reason why physicians
fail to cure is often because they have not studied their cases
sufficiently. While the treatment was mainly symptomatic, it was not
more so than is a great deal of therapeutics at the present time, even
in the regular school of medicine. The number and variety of their
remedies and of their modes of administering them is so marvellous,
that I prefer to quote Dr. von Klein's enumeration of them for you:

  "In this papyrus are mentioned over 700 different substances from
  the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms which act as stimulants,
  sedatives, motor excitants, motor depressants, narcotics, hypnotics,
  analgesics, anodynes, antispasmodics, mydriatics, myotics,
  expectorants, tonics, dentifrices, sialogogues, antisialics,
  refrigerants, emetics, antiemetics, carminatives, cathartics,
  purgatives, astringents, cholagogues, anthelmintics, restoratives,
  haematics, alteratives, antipyretics, antiphlogistics,
  antiperiodics, diuretics, diluents, diaphoretics, sudorifics,
  anhydrotics, emmenagogues, oxytocics, ecbolics, galactagogues,
  irritants, escharotics, caustics, styptics, haemostatics,
  emollients, demulcents, protectives, antizymotics, {48}
  disinfectants, deodorants, parasiticides, antidotes and
  antagonists."

Scarcely less interesting than the variety of remedies were their
methods of administration:

"Medicines are directed to be administered internally in the form of
decoctions, infusions, injections, pills, tablets, troches, capsules,
powders, potions and inhalations; and externally, as lotions,
ointments, plasters, etc. They are to be eaten, drunk, masticated or
swallowed, to be taken often once only--often for many days--and the
time is occasionally designated--to be taken mornings, evenings or at
bedtime. Formulas to disguise bad tasting medicaments are also given."
We have no advantages over the early Egyptians even in elegant
prescribing.

The traditions with regard to Egyptian medicine which came to the
Greeks seemed so incredible as we found them in the older historians
that they used to be joked about. Herodotus came in for a good deal of
this scoffing. He was said to be entirely too credulous and prone to
exaggerate in order to add interest to his history, but every advance
in our knowledge in modern time has confirmed what Herodotus has to
say. In the eighteenth century Voltaire said of him, "The Father of
history, nay, rather the Father of lies." That was Voltaire's way.
Anything that was above him he scoffed at. Homer was a wandering
minstrel such as you might find in the streets of Paris, Dante was a
mediaeval barbarian, {49} our own Shakespeare was a dramatic butcher,
producing his effects by bloodshed and cruelty upon the stage. The
nineteenth century has reversed Voltaire in every point of this,
though some still listen to him in other matters. Above all, Herodotus
has been amply justified by modern investigations. Herodotus tells us
of the tradition of the number of different kinds of medical
specialists in existence among the Egyptians. We are very prone to
think that specialism is a development of modern medicine. What we
know of Egypt shows us how old it is and makes it very clear that
there must have been specialized modes of medical education for these
many doctors who treated only very limited portions of the body and no
other.

Herodotus tells us, to quote for you the quaint English of one of the
old translations:

  "Physicke is so studied and practised with the Egyptians that every
  disease hath his several physician, who striveth to excell in
  healing that one disease and not to be expert in curing many.
  Whereof it cometh that every corner of that country is full of
  physicians. Some for the eyes, others for the head, many for the
  teeth, not a few for the stomach and the inwards."

The Ebers Papyrus shows us that the specialties were by no means
scantily developed. We have traditions of operations upon the nose, of
remedies for the eyes there are many and the diagnosis and treatment
of eye diseases are rather well {50} developed. The filling of teeth
seems even to have been practised, [Footnote 5] and while the
traditions in this matter are a little dubious, the evidence has been
accepted by some good authorities. This specialism in Egyptian
medicine probably existed long before Herodotus, for he seems to speak
of it as a very old-time institution in his time, and indeed Egypt had
degenerated so much that it would be hard to believe that there was
any such development there in his time. In the old temples they seem
to have used many modes of treatment that we are likely to think of as
very modern. Music for instance was used to soothe the worried,
amusements of various kinds were employed to influence the disturbed
mind favorably. In many ways some of the old temples resembled our
modern health resorts. To them many patients flocked and were treated
and talked about their ailments and went back each year for "the cure"
once more, all the while being more benefited, as is true also in our
own time, by the regularity of life, the regulation of diet and the
mental influence of the place, than by any of the drugs or even the
curative waters.

  [Footnote 5: Burdett: "History of Hospitals."]

In a word, our study of old Egypt and Egyptian education shows us men
doing things just about the way that our generation does them and
succeeding just about as well as we succeed. They taught writing,
spelling and composition as we do and the moral content of their
teaching is admirable. They had training schools for the arts {51} and
crafts, their taste is better than ours in many things, above all,
they trained workmen very well, and the remains of their achievements
are still the subject of our admiration. They solved mechanical
problems in the building of the pyramids quite as well as we do. They
made enough experiments that we would call chemical, to find enduring
pigments for decorative purposes and they succeeded in making tools
that enabled them to carve stonework beautifully. Even their
professional education was not very different from our own and its
results, particularly in the line of specialism, are startling
anticipations of the most modern phase of medicine. They anticipated
our interests in psychotherapy and some of them were mental healers,
and more of them used the influence of the mind on the body than our
physicians have been accustomed to until very recent years. Their
physicians and surgeons were held in the highest veneration, and what
we know of them shows that the judgment of the old Egyptians in this
matter was very good and better than the average appreciation of
physicians at the present time.

After all is said no one with any pretence to knowledge of the past
would claim for a moment that we were doing better work in anything
than men have done at many times in the history of culture. Our idea
of progress is just one of these vague bits of self-sufficiency that
each generation has had in its own time and that has made it feel {52}
that somehow what it is accomplishing means much in the world's
history. It is rather amusing to compare the estimate that any
generation has of itself with the appreciation of it by succeeding
generations. Especially is this true for generations separated by 100
years or more. Generations are only made up of men and women, and what
man or woman is there who has not thought many times during life that
though his or her work might not be estimated very highly by those
close to it, this was due but to a sad lack of proper appreciation,
since it represented certain qualities that well deserved admiration?
We are all gifted with this precious self-conceit, which is not so bad
a thing, after all, since it makes us work better than if we had a
proper but much less exalted appreciation of our real worth. It is
much easier to encourage people to do things than to scold or
criticise them into doing them. We shall not quarrel with our
generation, then, for being self-conceited,--it is made up of human
beings,--but we shall try and not let a due appreciation of our
accomplishment be smothered entirely, by this self-conceit.

After all, did not our favorite English poet of the late nineteenth
century declare us to be "the heirs of all the ages in the foremost
files of time," and how could it be otherwise than that we should be
far ahead of the past, not only because the evolution of man made him
more capable of handling difficult problems, but also because we {53}
had the advantage of the accumulated wisdom such as it was of the
past, of the observations and the conclusions of our forefathers and,
of course, we were far ahead of them. This idea, however, so widely
diffused that it might almost be spoken of as universal, has received
many jolts in recent times, since we have come to try to develop the
taste and the intellect of our people and not merely our material
comforts and our satisfaction with ourselves. It has been pointed out,
over and over again, in recent years that, of course, there is no such
thing as progress in literature, that in art we are far behind many
generations of the past, that in architecture there is not a new idea
in the world since the sixteenth century, that in all these modes of
human expression we are mere imitators and not originators. Our drama
is literally and literarily a farce, and no drama that any one expects
to live has been written for more than a century. Our buildings are
replicas of old-time structures, no matter what their purpose, whether
it be ecclesiastical, or educational, or municipal, or beneficiary.

Of course from the scientific standpoint this is, after all, what we
might expect. In all the years of history of which we have any record
there has been no change in the nature of man and no modification of
his being that would lead us to expect from him anything different
from what had been accomplished by man in the past. There is no change
in man's structure, in the size of his {54} body in any way, in his
anatomy or his physiology, in his customs, or ways of life, or in his
health. The healthy still have about the same expectation of life, to
use the life insurance term, and though we have increased the general
average duration of life this has been at the expense of other
precious qualities of the race. The healthy live longer, but the
unhealthy also live longer. The weaklings in mind and body whom nature
used to eliminate early are now a burden that must be cared for. In
general it may be said, and Virchow, the great German pathologist, who
was one of the world's great living anthropologists of his time--and
that but a few years ago--used to insist, that man's skeleton and,
above all, his skull as we can study them in the mummy of the olden
time, were exactly the same as those that the race has now. Man cannot
by thinking add a cubit to his stature, nor an inch to the
circumference of his skull. The seventh generation of an academic
family each member of which has been at the university in his time, is
not any more likely to have special faculties for the intellectual
life, indeed it is sometimes hinted that he has less of a chance than
if his parents had been peasants for as long as the history of the
family can be traced. Of course this has no proper bearing on
evolution from the biological standpoint, for the length of time that
we have in human history may be conceded to be entirely inadequate to
produce any noticeable changes on man's body or mind, {55} granting
that such were in progress. At the most we have 7,000 years of history
and the evolutionists would tell us that this is as nothing in the
unnumbered aeons of evolution. In the popular estimation, however,
evolution can almost be seen at work just as if one could see blades
of grass growing by watching them closely enough. This impression of
man's progress supposed to be supported by the theory of evolution is
entirely unfounded. Just as his body is the same and his brain the
same size, and the relative proportion of brain weight to body weight
or at least to skull capacity the same now as they were 6,000 years
ago; and this is true for both sexes, so that because women have
smaller bodies by one-eighth they also have smaller skulls, and this,
too, occurs among the mummies in Egypt quite as in our own time; so in
what he is able to do with body and mind man is unchanged. Something
of dexterity, of facility, of self-confidence and assurance of results
is gained from time to time in history, but lost as often, because a
few generations fail to be interested in what interested their
immediate predecessors immensely.

It is not surprising, then, that history should show us at all times
men doing work about like that which they did at any other
time--provided they were deeply interested enough. The wisdom of the
oldest book in the world, a father's advice to his son, is as
practical in most ways as Gorgon Graham's letters to his boy--and ever
so much {56} more ethical and true to life. The decorations of the old
Egyptian tombs, the architecture of their temples, their ways and
habits of life so far as we know them, all proclaim them men and women
just like ourselves, certainly not separated from us by any gulf or
even streamlet of evolution. What are more interesting than any
supposed progress in mankind, are the curious ups and downs of
interest in particular subjects which follow one another with almost
definite regularity in history as we know it. Men become occupied with
some phase of the expression of life, literature, architecture,
government, sometimes in two or three of these at the same time, and
then there comes a wonderful period of development. Just when this
epoch reaches an acme of power of expression there come a
self-consciousness and a refinement, welcomed at first as new
progress, but that seem to hamper originality. Then follows a period
of distinct decadence, but with a development of criticism of what was
done in the past, with the formulation of certain principles of
criticism. Just when by this conscious reflection it might be expected
that man would surely advance rapidly, further decay takes place and
there is a negative phase of power of expression, out of which man is
lifted by a new generation usually neglectful of the immediate past,
sometimes indeed deprecating it bitterly, though this new phase may
have been awakened by a further past, which gets back to nature and to
expression for itself.

{57}

The most interesting feature of history is how men have done things,
wonderful things that subsequent generations are sure to admire and
continue to admire whenever they have sense and training enough, yet
forget about them. This is true not only for artistic productions but
also for practical applications in science, for inventions, useful
discoveries and the like. In surgery, for instance, though we have a
continuous history of medicine, all of our instruments have been
re-invented at least three or four times. After the reinvention we
have been surprised to discover that previous generations had used
these instruments long before us. Even the Suez Canal was undoubtedly
open at least once before our time. Personally I feel sure that
America was discovered at least twice before Columbus' time and that
during several centuries there was considerable intercourse between
Europe and America. It is extremely important for us then to realize
these cycles in human progress and not to deceive ourselves with the
idea that because we are doing something that immediately preceding
generations knew nothing of, therefore we are doing something that
never was done in the world before. This is particularly important for
us now, for in my estimation the eighteenth was one of the lowest of
centuries in human accomplishment, and therefore we may easily deceive
ourselves as to our place in human history in this century.

{58}

Reflections of this kind are, it seems to me, particularly important
for educators, especially in the midst of our tendency to accept
evolution unthinkingly in this generation. Man's skull has not
changed, his body has not been modified, his soft tissues are the same
as they used to be. His brain is no different. Why, then, should he
not have done things in the olden time just about as he does them now?
We do not think that acquired characters are inherited. Oliver Wendell
Holmes talks of Emerson as the seventh generation of an academic
family, but there are none of us who think that this made it any
easier for Emerson to acquire an education, or gave him a better
development of mind. Those of us who have experience in education know
that the descendant of a family of peasants for centuries or of
farmers for many generations, easily outstrips some of the scions of
academic families in intellect. It is the man that counts and not his
descent.

Just this is true of generations as well as of individuals. Whenever
men have set themselves to doing things they have accomplished about
as good results at any time in history as at any other. We apparently
do not benefit by the accumulation of the experience of our
predecessors. At least we can find no trace of that in history. For a
certain number of enterprising generations there is manifest upward
progress. Then something always happens to disturb the succession of
ideas, sometimes it is nothing more than {59} an over-refinement that
leads to bad taste, and decadence takes the place of progress. The
accomplishment of any particular generation, then, depends not on its
place in any real or fancied scheme of evolution, but on its own
ideals and its determined efforts to achieve them.

There are people who insist that this doctrine is pessimistic and
discouraging and that, if we do not keep before men the consoling
feeling that they are advancing beyond their forebears, there is not
the same incentive to work as there would be under other
circumstances. On the contrary, as it seems to me, this other idea
that everything depends on ourselves and not on our predecessors,
constitutes the highest form of incentive. We at the present time are
far below many preceding generations in art, literature, architecture,
arts and crafts and many developments of taste. Here is no evolution,
but the story of how each generation sets itself to work. Why, then,
should we think that in education, one of the highest of the arts, the
moulding of the human mind into beautiful shapes instead of the
moulding of more plastic material, we should be far ahead of the past
and, therefore, in a position to find no precious lessons in it? The
history of education not alone of the last three centuries of
education, but of at least 6,000 years of education, is worth while
knowing and it magnificently exemplifies how old is the new in
education.

{60}

{61}

THE FIRST MODERN UNIVERSITY

{62}

  "What is it that hath been? The same thing that shall be. What is it
  that hath been done? The same that shall be done."
  --_Ecclesiastes i:10._


  "To one small people . . . it was given to create the principle of
  Progress. That people was the Greek. Except the blind forces of
  nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its
  origin."
  --Maine.


{63}

THE FIRST MODERN UNIVERSITY [Footnote 6]

  [Footnote 6: The material for this address was gathered for lectures
  on the History of Education at St. Mary's Seminary, Scranton, Pa.,
  and St. Joseph's College, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. It was
  largely added to for the introductory lecture in a course to the
  teachers of the parochial schools of Philadelphia, March, 1910. Very
  nearly in its present form it was delivered before the Brooklyn
  Institute of Arts and Sciences as the second lecture in the course
  on "How Old The New Is," April, 1910.]


We are very prone to think that our universities represent new
developments in the history of humanity. We are aware that there were
great educational institutions in the world at many times before the
present, and that some of them profoundly affected the intellectual
life of their time; we are likely to think, however, that these
institutions were very different from our modern universities. They
were not so well organized, they lacked endowments, their departments
were not co-ordinated, they did not have the libraries and, of course,
not the laboratory facilities that our modern universities have, and
then, above all, they did not devote themselves to that one department
of knowledge, physical science, in which absolute truth can be
reached, and in which each advance in knowledge as made can be
chronicled and set down as a sure basis for future work and workers in
the same line for all time. {64} The older institutions of learning
were given up to speculation, to idealism, to metaphysics, and, of
course, therefore, their work, as many educated people are now prone
to look at it, was too shadowy to last, too cloudy to serve as a
foundation for any enduring scientific knowledge. I do not think that
I exaggerate when I make this as the statement of the thought of a
good many people of our time who are at least supposed to be educated
and who consider that they are reasonably familiar with the
educational institutions of the past.

It has seemed to me, then, that it would be interesting and opportune
to trace the origin, the development and the accomplishments of the
first institution of learning that is very similar to our own; and to
retrace some of the achievements of its professors, the circumstances
in which they were done and the conditions surrounding an ancient
school which I think our study will make clear as well deserving of
the title of the first modern university. This was not the collection
of schools at Athens, though there is no doubt at all that great
intellectual and educational work was accomplished there, but not in
our modern university sense. The schools were independent, and while
the rivalry engendered by this undoubtedly did good so long as genius
ruled in the schools, it brought about a degeneration into sophistry,
from here comes the word, and argumentativeness, once the great master
had been {65} displaced by disciples who were sure that they knew
their master's mind, and probably thought, as disciples always do,
that they were going beyond their master, but who really occupied
themselves with curious and trifling tergiversations of mind within
the narrow circle of ideas laid down by the master,--as has nearly
always been the case.

The first modern university was that of Alexandria. It was quite as
much under Greek influence as the schools of Athens. There have been
commentators on the story of Cleopatra, who have suggested that her
African cast of countenance did not prove a deterrent to her success
as a conqueror of hearts, and who argue from this to the fact that it
is not physical charm but personality that counts in woman's power
over men, quite forgetting, if they ever knew, that Cleopatra was a
Greek of the Greeks, a daughter of the line of the Ptolemys, probably
a direct descendant though with the bar sinister of Philip of Macedon,
born of a house so watchful over its Greek blood and so resentful of
any possible admixture of anything less noble with itself, that for
generations it had been the custom for brother to marry sister, in
order that the race of the Ptolemys might be perpetuated in absolute
purity. Alexandria, while a cosmopolitan city in the inhabitants who
dwelt in it and in the wide diffusion of commercial interests that
centred there as a mart for East and West, was absolutely ruled by
Greeks and represents for many centuries after {66} the decline of
Athens had come, the brightest focus of Greek intellectual life, Greek
culture and art, Greek letters and education and every phase of that
Greek influence in aesthetics which has always meant so much in the
world's history.

The interesting fact about Alexandria in the history of education, is
that it was the home of a modern university in every sense of that
term, having particularly the features that many people are prone to
think of as representing modern evolution in education. The buildings
of the university were erected practically by a legacy left by the
great Conqueror himself, Alexander. The central point of interest in
the university was a great library, the nucleus of which was the
library of Aristotle, tutor of Alexander, which had been collected
with the help of that great Conqueror and was the finest collection of
books in the world of that time. The main subject of interest in the
university was physical science and its sister subject mathematics,
which raises mere nature-study into the realm of science, and this
scientific physical education was conducted in connection with the
great museum or collection of objects of interest to scientists that
had also been made partly by Aristotle himself and partly for his
loved tutor by the gratitude of Alexander during his conquering
expeditions in the far East. Finally professors were attracted to
Alexandria by the offer of a better salary than had ever been paid at
educational institutions before this, and {67} by the additional offer
of a palace to live in, supplied by the ruler of the country. It is no
wonder, then, that in attendance also, as well as in the prestige of
its professors, Alexandria resembled a modern university.

It was its devotion to science, however, that especially characterized
this first great institution of learning of which we have definite
records. This devotion to science went so far that even literature was
studied from the scientific standpoint. Such details as we have of the
instruction at Alexandria and the books that have come down to us, all
show men interested in philology, in comparative literature, in
grammar and comparative grammar, rather than in the idealistic modes
of knowledge. We have commentaries on the great authors, but no great
original works of genius in literature from the professors of
Alexandria. The translation of the Septuagint version of the Old
Testament is a typical example of the sort of work that was being done
at Alexandria. They collected the documents of the nations and
translated them for purposes of comparative study. It was an education
for information rather than for power. The main idea of the time and
place was to know as much as possible about literature, rather than to
know what it represented in terms of life, and the real meaning of
both literature and life was obscured in the study about and about
them. People studied books about books rather than the books {68}
themselves. There was much writing of books about books, and it was
nearly always comparatively trivial things in the great authors that
attracted most attention from the many scholiasts, critics, editors,
commentators, lecturers of the time.

Personally I could well understand such an incident happening at
Alexandria as is said to have happened at a well-known English (of
course not American!) university not long ago. The class was
construing Shakespeare and one of the students asked the professor
what the meaning of a particular figure used by the great dramatist
was. The professor replied that they were there to construe
Shakespeare's language and not bother about his meaning--yet it was a
class in literature. Literature in recent years as studied at the
universities has come to be quite as scientific in its modes and
methods as it was at the University of Alexandria. May I also add that
it has become quite as sterile of results of any importance. There is
very little real study of literature, practically no encouragement of
the attempt to draw inspiration from the great authors, but all
devotion to the grammar, to the philology, to comparative literature
as exemplified in the old writers.

Books were the great essentials at Alexandria. This is not surprising
seeing that the university was founded around a great library, and
that this library continued to be the greatest in the world in its
time. Every student who came to Alexandria bringing a book with him of
which there was {69} no copy in the library, was required by a decree
of the authorities to leave a copy behind him. In all the university
towns of the times--and there were many founded in the rising eastern
cities of Alexander's empire, as it gradually crumbled into smaller
pieces providing new capitals with less power but with quite as much
national feeling as the capital cities of larger states, libraries
became the fashion and a city's main claim to prestige in education
and the intellectual life was the number of its books. Antioch,
Tarsus, Cos, Cnidos and Pergamos are examples of this state of
affairs. Pergamos was so jealous of the prestige of the Alexandrian
Library that it forbade the exportation of parchment, an invention of
Pergamos which received its name from that city. Petty jealousies were
quite as much the rule among educational institutions then as they
have been at any time since.

To many people it will seem quite absurd to talk of Alexandria as
having done serious scientific work because the methods of science and
scientific investigation are supposed to have been, as they think,
discovered by Lord Bacon in the seventeenth century. It is curious how
many educated people, or at least supposedly educated people, have
this as their basic notion of the history of science. Men wandered in
the mazes of inductive reasoning utterly unable to bring observations
together in such a way as to discover laws, utterly incompetent to
note phenomena and {70} bring them into relations to one another so as
to show their scientific bearing, until Queen Elizabeth's Lord
Chancellor came to show the way out of the labyrinth and leave the
precious cord through its corridors, by which others may easily thread
their way into the free air of scientific truth. I know nothing that
is more absurd than this. It is a commonplace among educators,
however; it is frequently referred to in educational addresses as if
it were a universally accepted proposition, and to dispute it would
seem the rankest kind of scientific heresy to these narrow minds.
Fortunately there are two writers, Macaulay and Huxley, to whom even
these people are likely to listen, who have expressed themselves with
regard to this precious historic superstition that Lord Bacon invented
the inductive method of reasoning with what my long-worded friend
would call appropriate opprobrium.

Macaulay says: "The inductive method has been practised ever since the
beginning of the world by every human being. It is constantly
practised by the most ignorant clown, by the most thoughtless
schoolboy, by the very child at the breast. That method leads the
clown to the conclusion that if he sows barley he shall not reap
wheat. By that method the schoolboy learns that a cloudy day is the
best for catching trout. The very infant, we imagine, is led by
induction to expect milk from his mother or nurse, and none from his
father. Not only is it not true that {71} Bacon invented the inductive
method; but it is not true that he was the first person who correctly
analyzed that method and explained its uses. Aristotle had long before
pointed out the absurdity of supposing that syllogistic reasoning
could ever conduct men to the discovery of any new principle, had
shown that such discoveries must be made by induction, and by
induction alone, and had given the history of the inductive process,
concisely indeed, but with great perspicuity and precision."

And Huxley quite as emphatically points out: "The method of scientific
investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of
working of the human mind. It is simply the mode by which all
phenomena are reasoned about--rendered precise and exact."

While the whole trend of education, even that of literature, was
scientific at Alexandria, the principal feature of the teaching was,
as we have said, concerned with the physical sciences and mathematics.
It is in mathematics that the greatest triumphs were secured. Euclid's
"Geometry," as we use it at the present time in our colleges and
universities, was put into form by Euclid teaching at the University
of Alexandria in the early days of the institution. Euclid's setting
forth of geometry was so perfect that it has remained for over 2,000
years the model on which all text-books of geometry of all the later
times have been written. There seems no doubt that {72} writers on the
history of mathematics are quite justified in proclaiming Euclid's
"Geometry" as one of the greatest intellectual works that ever came
from the hand of man. The first Ptolemy was fortunate in having
secured this man as the founder of the mathematical department of his
university. His example, the wonderful incentive of his work, the
absolute perfection of his conclusions, must have proved marvellous
emulative factors for the students who flocked to Alexandria.

Commonly mathematicians are said to be impractical geniuses so
occupied with mathematical ideas that their influence in other ways
counts for little in university life. If we are to believe the stories
that come to us with regard to Euclid, however, and there is every
reason to believe them, for some of them come from men who are almost
contemporaries, or from men who had their information from
contemporaries, Euclid's influence in the university must have been
for all that is best in education. Proclus tells the story of King
Ptolemy once having asked Euclid, if there was any shorter way to
obtain a knowledge of geometry than through the rather difficult
avenue of Euclid's own text-book, and the great mathematician replied
that there was "no royal road to geometry." Stobaeus relates the story
of a student who, having learned the first theorem, asked "but what
shall I make by learning these things?" The question is so modern that
Euclid's {73} answer deserves to be in the memory of all those who are
interested in education. Euclid called his slave and said, "Give him
twopence, since he must make something out of everything that he does,
even the improvement of his mind."

Probably even more significant than the tradition that Euclid did his
work at this first modern university, and that besides being a
mathematician he was a man of very practical ideas in education, is
the fact that he was appreciated by the men of his time and that his
work was looked up to with highest reverence by his contemporaries and
immediate successors as representing great achievement. It is not ever
thus. Far from resenting in any way the magnificent synthesis that he
had made of many rather vague notions in mathematics before his time,
his contemporaries united in doing him honor. They realized that his
teaching created a proper scientific habit of mind. Pappus says of
Apollonius that he spent a long time as a pupil of Euclid at
Alexandria and it was thus that he acquired a thorough scientific
habit of mind. After Euclid's time the value of his discoveries as a
means of training the mind was thoroughly appreciated. The Greek
philosophers are said to have posted on the doors of their schools
"Let no one enter here who does not know his Euclid." In the midst of
the crumbling of old-fashioned methods of education in the
introduction of the elective system, in the modern time, many of our
best educators have insisted {74} that at least this portion of
mathematics, Euclid's contribution to the science, should be a
required study, and most educators feel, even when there is question
of law or medical study, that one of the best preparations is to be
found in a thorough knowledge of Euclid.

Almost as wonderful as the work of Euclid was that of the second great
mathematician of the Alexandrian school, Archimedes, who not only
developed pure mathematics but applied mathematical principles to
mechanics and proved besides to have wonderful mechanical ability and
inventive genius. It was Archimedes of whom Cicero spoke so feelingly
in his "Tusculan Disputations," when about a century and a quarter
after Archimedes' death, he succeeded in finding, his tomb in the old
cemetery at Syracuse during his quaestorship there. How curious it is
to think that after so short a time as 127 years from the date of his
death Archimedes was absolutely forgotten by his fellow-Syracusans,
who resolutely denied that any trace of Archimedes' tomb existed. This
stranger from Rome knew much more of Archimedes than his
fellow-citizens a scant four generations after his time. Not how men
advance, but how they forget even great advance that has been made,
lose sight of it entirely at times and only too often have to
rediscover it, is the most interesting phase of history. Cicero says,
"Thus one of the noblest cities of Greece and one which at one time
had been very {75} celebrated for learning, knew nothing of the
monument of its greatest genius until it was rediscovered for them by
a native of Arpinum"--Cicero's modest designation for himself.

We have known much more about Archimedes' inventions than about his
mathematical works. The Archimedian screw, a spiral tube for pumping
water, invented by him, is still used in Egypt. The old story with
regard to his having succeeded in making burning mirrors by which he
was enabled to set the Roman vessels on fire during the siege of
Syracuse, used to be doubted very seriously and, indeed, by many
considered a quite incredible feat, clearly an historical
exaggeration, until Cuvier and others in the early part of the
nineteenth century succeeded in making a mirror by which in an
experiment in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris wood was set on fire at
a distance of 140 feet. As the Roman vessels were very small,
propelled only by oars or at least with very small sail capacity, and
as their means of offence was most crude and they had to approach
surely within 100 feet of the wall to be effective, the old story
therefore is probably entirely true. The other phase of history
according to which Archimedes succeeded in constructing instruments by
which the Roman vessels were lifted bodily out of the water, is
probably also true, and certainly comes with great credibility of the
man of whom it is told that, after having studied the lever, he
declared that if he only had {76} some place to rest his lever, he
could move the world.

The well-known story of his discovery in hydrostatics, by which he was
enabled to tell the King whether the royal goldsmiths had made his
crown of solid gold or not, is very well authenticated. Archimedes
realized the application of the principle of specific gravity in the
solution of such problems while he was taking a bath. Quite forgetful
of his state of nudity he ran through the streets, crying "Eureka!
Eureka! I have found it! I have found it!" There are many other
significant developments of hydrostatics and mechanics, besides
specific gravity and the lever, the germs of which are at least
attributed to Archimedes. He seems to have been one of the world's
great eminent practical geniuses. That he should have been a product
of Alexandria and should even have been a professor there would be a
great surprise if we did not know Alexandria as a great scientific
university. As it is, it is quite easy to understand how naturally he
finds his place in the history of that university and how proud any
modern university would be to have on the rolls of its students and
professors a man who not only developed pure science but who made a
series of practical applications that are of great value to mankind.
Such men our modern universities appropriately claim the right to
vaunt proudly as the products of their training.

When we analyze something of the work in {77} pure mathematics that
was accomplished by Archimedes our estimation of him is greatly
enhanced. His work "On the Quadrature," that is the finding of the
area of a segment of the parabola, is probably his most significant
contribution to mathematical knowledge. His proof of the principal
theorem in this is obtained by the "method of exhaustion," which had
been invented by Eudoxus but was greatly developed by Archimedes. This
method contains in itself the germ of that most powerful instrument of
mathematical analysis in the modern time, the calculus.

Another very important work was "The Sphere and the Cylinder." This
was more appreciated in his own time, and as a consequence, after his
death the figure of a sphere inscribed in a cylinder was cut on his
tomb in commemoration of his favorite theorem, that the volume of the
sphere is two-thirds that of the cylinder and its surface is four
times that of the base of the cylinder. It was by searching for this
symbol, famous in antiquity, that Cicero was enabled to find his tomb
according to the story that I have already related.

Within the last few years the reputation of Archimedes in pure
mathematics has been greatly enhanced by the discovery by Professor
Heiberg of a lost work of the great Alexandrian professor in
Constantinople. Archimedes himself stated in a dedication of the work
to Eratosthenes the method employed in this. He says: "I have thought
it well to analyze and lay down for you {78} in this same book a
peculiar method by means of which it will be possible for you to
derive instruction as to how certain mathematical questions may be
investigated by means of mechanics. And I am convinced that this is
equally profitable in demonstrating a proposition itself, for much
that was made evident to me through the medium of mechanics was later
proved by means of geometry, because the treatment by the former
method had not yet been established by way of a demonstration. For of
course it is easier to establish a proof, if one has in this way
previously obtained a conception of the questions, than for him to
seek it without such a preliminary notion. . . . Indeed, I assume that
some one among the investigators of to-day or in the future, will
discover by the method here set forth still other propositions which
have not yet occurred to me." On this Professor Smith comments:
"Perhaps in all the history of mathematics no such prophetic truth was
ever put into words. It would almost seem as if Archimedes must have
seen as in a vision the methods of Galileo, Cavalieri, Pascal, Newton,
and many other great makers of the mathematics of the Renaissance and
the present time."

Many other distinguished professors of mathematics have, since this
declaration of Archimedes came under their notice, declared that he
must have had almost a prophetic vision of certain developments of
mathematics and especially applied {79} mathematics and mechanics and
their relation to one another, that were only to come in much later
and indeed comparatively modern times. Undoubtedly Archimedes' works
proved the germ of magnificent development not only immediately after
his own time but in the long-after time of the Renaissance, when their
translation awakened minds to mathematical problems and their
solutions that would not otherwise have come.

We know much less of the life of the third of the great trio of
teachers and students of Alexandria, Apollonius of Perga. Perhaps it
should be enough for us to know that his contemporaries spoke of him
as "the great geometer," though they were familiar with Euclid's book
and with Archimedes' mighty work. Apollonius was surely a student of
Alexandria for many years and he was probably also a professor of
mathematics there. He developed especially what we know now as conic
sections. His book on the subject contains practically all of the
theorems to be found in our text-books of analytical geometry or conic
sections of the present time. It was developed with rigorous
mathematical logic and Euclidean conclusiveness. These three men show
us beyond all doubt how finely the mathematical side of the university
developed.

After Archimedes the greatest mechanical genius of the University of
Alexandria was Heron. To him we owe a series of inventions and
discoveries in hydrostatics and the {80} construction of various
mechanical toys that have been used in the laboratories since. There
is even a little engine run by steam--the aeolipile--invented by him,
which shows how close the old Greeks were to the underlying principles
of discoveries that were destined to come only after the development
of industries created a demand for them in the after time. Heron's
engine is a globe of copper mounted on pivots, containing water, which
on being heated produces steam that finds its way out through tubes
bent so as to open in opposite directions on each side of the globe.
The impact of the escaping steam on the air sets the globe revolving,
and the principle of the turbine engine at work is clear. We have used
steam for nearly 200 years always with a reciprocating type of
movement, so that to apply energy in one direction the engine has had
to move its parts backwards and forwards, but here was a direct-motion
turbine engine in the long ago. Our great steamboats, the _Lusitania_
and the _Mauretania,_ now cross the ocean by the use of this principle
and not by the reciprocating engine, and it is evident that it is
along these lines the future developments of the application of steam
are to take place.

Another extremely interesting invention made by Heron is the famous
fountain called by his name, and which still is used to illustrate
principles in pneumatics in our classrooms and laboratories. By means
of condensed air water is made {81} to spring from a jet in a
continuous stream and seems paradoxically to rise higher than its
source. Probably his best work in the domain of physics is that on
pneumatics in which are given not only a series of discussions, but of
experiments and demonstrations on the elasticity of air and of steam.
These experiments could only have been conducted in what we now call a
physical laboratory. Indeed these inventions of his are still used in
laboratories for demonstration purposes. While we may think, then,
that the foundation of laboratories was reserved to our day, there is
abundant evidence for their existence at the University of Alexandria.
We shall return to this subject a little later, when the evidence from
other departments has been presented, and then it will be clear, I
think, that the laboratory methods were favorite modes of teaching at
the University of Alexandria and were in use in nearly all departments
of science both for research and for demonstration purposes.

The work of the other great teacher at Alexandria which was to
influence mankind next to that of Euclid, was not destined to
withstand the critical study of succeeding generations, though it
served for some 1,500 years as the basis of their thinking in
astronomy. This was the work of Ptolemy, the great professor of
astronomy at Alexandria of the first century after Christ. It is easy
for us now to see the absurdity of Ptolemy's system. It is even hard
for us to {82} understand how men could have accepted it. It must not
be forgotten, however, that it solved all the astronomical problems of
fifteen centuries and that it even enabled men, by its application, to
foretell events in the heavens, and scientific prophecy is sometimes
claimed to be the highest test of the truth of a system of scientific
thought. Even so late as 1620 Francis Bacon refused to accept
Copernicanism, already before the world for more than a century,
because it did not, as it seemed to him, solve all the difficulties,
while Ptolemy's system did. As great an astronomer as Tycho Brahe
living in the century after Copernicus still clung to Ptolemy's
teaching. It must not be forgotten that when Galileo restated
Copernicanism, the reason for the rejection of his teaching by all the
astronomers of Europe almost without exception, was that his reasons
were not conclusive. They preferred to hold on to the old which had
been so satisfying than to accept the new which seemed dubious. Their
wisdom in this will be best appreciated from the fact that none of
Galileo's reasons maintained themselves.

Though his system has been rejected, still Ptolemy must be looked up
to as one of the great teachers of mankind and his work the "Almagest"
as one of the great contributions to human knowledge. The fact that he
represented a climax of astronomical development at Alexandria some
four centuries after the foundation of {83} that university, serves to
show how much that first modern university occupied itself for all the
centuries of its highest prestige, with physical science as well as
with mathematics. Astronomy, physics, especially hydrostatics and
mechanics, were all wonderfully developed. Generations of professors
had given themselves to research and to the publication of important
works quite as in the modern time, and Alexandria may well claim the
right to be placed beside any university for what it accomplished in
physical science, and rank high if not highest in the list of great
research institutions adding new knowledge to old, leading men across
the borderland of the unknown in science and furnishing that precious
incentive to growing youth to occupy itself with the scientific
problems of the world around it.

The most important part of the scientific work of the University of
Alexandria to my mind remains to be spoken of, and that is the medical
department. It is a well-known law in the history of medicine that,
whenever medical schools are attached to universities in such a way
that students who come to the medical department have been thoroughly
trained by preliminary studies and have such standards of scholarship
as obtain in genuine university work, then great progress in medicine
and in medical education is accomplished. This was eminently the case
at Alexandria. The departments of the arts, of linguistics and of
philosophy were gathered {84} around the great building known in Greek
as the Mouseion, a word that has come to us through the Latin under
the guise of Museum. This temple of the Muses contained collections of
various kinds and near it was situated the great library. Not far away
was the Serapeum, or Temple of Serapis, the Goddess of Life, around
which were centred the biological sciences, and close by was the
medical school. As teachers for this medical school some of the
greatest physicians of the time were secured by the first Ptolemy and
a great period in medical history began.

The practical wisdom guiding the Ptolemys in the organization of this
medical school will be best appreciated from the fact that they took
the first step by inviting two distinguished physicians, the products
of the two greatest medical schools of the time, to lay the
foundations at Alexandria. They were probably the best investigators
of their time and they had behind them fine traditions of research,
thorough observation and conservative reasoning and theorizing on
scientific subjects. Erasistratos was a disciple of Metrodoros, the
son-in-law of Aristotle. He had studied for a time under another great
teacher, Chrysippos of Cnidos. We are likely to know much more of Cos
than of Cnidos because of the reputation in the after time of
Hippocrates, whose name is so closely connected with Cos that the two
are almost invariably associated, but Cnidos was one of the great
university towns of the later Greek {85} civilization. Eudoxus the
astronomer, Ctesias the writer on Persian history, and Sostratos the
builder of the great lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the
world, the Pharos at Alexandria, were products of this university. Its
medical school was famous when Cos had somewhat declined, and
Chrysippos was one of the leading physicians of the world and one of
the acknowledged great teachers of medicine when Erasistratos studied
under him at Cnidos, and obtained that scientific training and
incentive to original research which was to prove so valuable to
Alexandria.

His colleague, Herophilos, was quite as distinguished as Erasistratos
and owed his training to the rival school of Cos. Whether it was
intentional or not to secure these two products of rival schools for
the healthy spirit of competition that would come from it, and because
they wanted to have at Alexandria the emulation that would naturally
be aroused by such a condition, is not known, but there can be no
doubt of the wisdom of the choice and of the foresight which dictated
it. Herophilos had studied medicine under Praxagoras, one of the
best-known successors of Hippocrates. While distinguished as a surgeon
he had more influence on medicine than almost any man of his time,
except possibly Erasistratos. He was, however, a great anatomist and,
above all, a zoologist who, according to tradition, had obtained his
knowledge of animals from the most {86} careful zootomy of literally
thousands of specimens. His fair fame is blackened by the other
tradition that he practised vivisection on human beings--criminals
being turned over to him for that purpose by the Ptolemys, who were
deeply interested in his researches. The traditions in this matter,
however, serve to confirm the idea of his zeal as an investigator and
his ardent labors in medical science. Tertullian declares that he
dissected at least 600 living persons. We know that he did much
dissection of human cadavers and there is question whether
Tertullian's statement was not gross exaggeration due to confusion
between dissection and vivisection.

Both of these men did some magnificent work upon the brain. This being
the first period in the history of humanity when human beings could be
dissected freely, it is not surprising that they should take up brain
anatomy with ardent devotion, in the hope to solve some of the many
human problems that seemed to centre in this complex organ. Before
this anatomy had been learned mainly from animals, and as human beings
differ most widely from animals by their brain, naturally, as soon as
the opportunity presented itself, anatomists gave themselves to
thorough work on this structure where so many discoveries were waiting
to be made. After the brain and nervous system the heart was studied,
and Erasistratos' description of its valves, of its general structure
and even of its physiology, show how much he {87} knew. To know
something of the work of these two anatomists is to see at once what
is accomplished in a university medical school where medical science,
and not the mere practice of medicine alone, is the object of teachers
and students. I have told the story of this in my address before the
graduates of the St. Louis Medical University Medical School, and here
I shall simply refer you to that. [Footnote 7]

  [Footnote 7: The details of what was accomplished in the Medical
  Department at Alexandria were given to some extent at least in the
  lecture in Brooklyn, but are omitted here in order to avoid
  repetitions in the printed copy.]

Of course all these studies at the university could not be conducted
without laboratory equipment. Of itself the dissecting room is a
laboratory and until very recent years it was the only laboratory that
most of the medical schools had. The numerous experiments in
vivisection, if they really took place, required special arrangements
and could only be conducted in what we now call a laboratory of
physiology. This is not idle talk but represents the realities of the
situation. Other laboratories there must have been. It would be quite
impossible to conceive of a man like Archimedes carrying on his work,
especially of the application of mathematical principles to mechanics,
of the demonstration of mechanical principles themselves and of the
invention of the many interesting machines which he made, without what
we call laboratory facilities. The Ptolemys were {88} interested in
his work, they supplied him with a place to do it, many of his
advanced students at least must have been interested in this work so
that, as I see it, there was what we would now call a physical
laboratory in connection with his teaching at the University of
Alexandria.

What we know about the development of zoology under Erasistratos and
Herophilos would seem to indicate that there must have been such
special facilities for the investigation of zoological problems as we
would call a laboratory of physiology. A magnificent collection of
plants was made for the university and these were studied and
classified, and while we hear nothing of their dissection, there were
at least botanical rooms for methodical study, if not botanical
laboratories. Ptolemy's work represented the culmination of
astronomical information which had been gathered for several
centuries. This could only be brought together in what we would now
call an observatory and this represents another laboratory of physical
science. Our laboratory work, therefore, must have been anticipated to
a great extent. We must not forget that our university laboratories
are only a couple of generations old altogether and that they
represent a very recent development of educational work. It is
extremely interesting, therefore, to find them anticipated in germ at
least, if not in actuality, at the first modern university of which we
have sufficiently complete records to enable us to {89} appreciate
just the sort of work that was being done and the ways and modes of
its education.

I think that even this comparatively meagre description of the first
university of which we have knowledge makes it very clear that
Alexandria deserves the name of the First Modern University. It
resembled our own in so many ways that I, for one, find it impossible
to discover any essential difference between them. At Alexandria they
anticipated every phase of modern university education. Their
literature was studied from a scientific standpoint. They devoted
themselves to an overwhelming extent to the study of the physical
sciences and mathematics, their professors were inventors, developers
of practical applications of science, experts to whom appeal was made
when important scientific questions had to be settled, and their
teaching was done with demonstrations and a laboratory system very
like our own. Nothing that I know illustrates better the tendency of
human achievement not to represent advance but to occur in cycles than
the story of this first modern university. That is why I have tried to
tell it to you as an exquisite illustration of How Old the New Is in
Education.

{90}

{91}

MEDIAEVAL SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSITIES

{92}

  "Qui ad pauca respiciunt faciliter pronuntiant."
  --AN OLD PHILOSOPHER.

  [Those who know little readily pronounce judgment.]


{93}


MEDIAEVAL SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSITIES [Footnote 8]

  [Footnote 8: The material for this address was originally gathered
  for a lecture in a course on the History of Education delivered to
  the Sisters of Charity of Mount St. Vincent's, some 500 in number;
  teachers in the Catholic public schools of New York City, and for
  corresponding lectures to the Academy of the Sacred Heart, Kenwood.
  The address was delivered substantially in its present form at the
  Catholic Club of Cornell University, under the title "The Relations
  of the Church to Science."]


Probably nothing is more surprising to any one who knows the history
of science and of scientific education than the attitude of mind of
the present generations, educated as they are mainly along scientific
lines, toward the supposed lack of interest of preceding generations
in science. Our scholars and professors seem to be almost universally
of the opinion that the last few generations are the first who ever
devoted themselves seriously to the study of science, or who, indeed,
were free enough from superstitions and persuasions and beliefs of
many kinds to give themselves up freely to scientific investigation.
In the light of what we know or, perhaps I should say, what we are
coming to know now with regard to the educational interests of the men
of the various times, this would be an amusing, if it were not an
amazing, presumption on our part. Over and over again in the world's
history men have been {94} interested in science, both in pure science
and in applied science, in the culture sciences and in the practical
sciences.

Apparently men forget that philosophy is science and ethics is science
and metaphysics is scientific and logic is science and there is a
science of language. Of course the protest that will be heard at once
is that what we now mean by science is physical science. Even taking
the word science in this narrower sense, however, how can people
forget that our mathematics comes to us from the old Greeks, that old
Greek contributions to medicine and, above all, to the scientific side
of it still remain valuable, that physical science, pure and applied,
developed wonderfully at the University of Alexandria, that there was
a beginning of chemistry and the great foundations of astronomy laid
in the long ago, and that men evidently were quite as much interested
in the problems of nature around them as they have been at any time:
Archimedes insisting that if he only had some place to rest his lever
he could move the world, inventing the screw pump, fashioning his
great burning-mirrors, and a little later Heron inventing the first
germ of the turbine engine, while all the time their colleagues and
contemporaries were developing the mathematics in connection with
them, are studying both pure and applied science. It is simply failure
to state in terms of the present what was accomplished in the past,
that has permitted people to retain {95} curious notions of the
absence of science in antiquity.

Probably most people would be quite ready to concede, and especially
after even a brief calling to their attention of some educational
facts, that the old Greeks did enjoy a scientific educational
development; it would probably even be admitted that the traditions of
science of various kinds from Egypt, from Chaldea, from Babylonia
point to previous eras of scientific development. They would probably
still insist, however, that there had been a long interval of utter
neglect of science lasting nearly 2,000 years and that our interest is
properly a resurrection of science-study after a long burial. They do
not even hesitate to blame the educational authorities of the interval
for their failure to occupy themselves with scientific ideas and are
prone to find reasons of various kinds to account for this failure. As
the Church was dominant in education during the Middle Ages this makes
a ready scapegoat, and so we have heard much of the repression of
scientific study by the ecclesiastical authorities, and the determined
effort made to keep men from inquiring about the problems of nature
around them, because this would lead them to think for themselves and
have doubts with regard to faith. Indeed this attitude of mind in the
history of science is so usual that it is a commonplace, and men who
are supposed to be scholars talk off-handedly of direct Church
opposition to science.

{96}

There is no doubt at all that the Church was the commanding influence
in education during the Middle Ages. Whatever was studied was taken up
because the Church authorities were interested in it. Whatever was not
studied was absent from the curriculum because of their lack of
interest. While study was magnificently encouraged there were many
subjects, though not near so many as is often thought, that were
repressed. The Church must certainly be held responsible in every way
for the teaching of the Middle Ages, both as regards its extent and
its limitations. The charters of the universities were granted by the
Popes. The universities themselves usually were cathedral schools
which had developed, and to which had become attached various graduate
departments. The ecclesiastical authorities were in control of them.
The rector of the university was usually the archdeacon of the
cathedral or the chancellor of the diocese. The professors at the
universities were practically all of them in clerical orders, and the
great body of the students were clerics, in the sense that they had
assumed at least minor orders and were supposed to be in preparation
for a clerical life. This was, indeed, the one sure way to secure
exemption from the military duties of the time and to prevent
interference of various kinds by the civil power with the leisure
necessary for study. No man had any essential rights in the Middle
Ages except such as were conferred on him by some organization {97} to
which he belonged, and the clerical order was particularly powerful.

Now the interesting phase of the education afforded by these
universities under ecclesiastical control with clerical students and
professors constituting the large majority of members, with the
influence of the religious orders paramount for centuries, is that it
was entirely scientific in character and largely occupied with the
physical sciences, though the culture sciences formed the basis of it.
Huxley, though he is surely the last man of recent times who would be
suspected for a moment of exaggerating the scientific significance of
mediaeval education, recognized this fact very well and stated it very
emphatically. In his Inaugural Address on Universities Actual and
Ideal, delivered as Rector of Aberdeen University after discussing the
subject with evident careful preparation, he said:

  "The scholars of the mediaeval universities seem to have studied
  grammar, logic and rhetoric; arithmetic and geometry; astronomy,
  theology and music. Thus, their work, however imperfect and faulty,
  judged by modern lights, it may have been, brought them face to face
  with all the leading aspects of the many-sided mind of man. For
  these studies did really contain, at any rate in embryo, sometimes
  it may be in caricature, what we now call philosophy, mathematical
  and physical science and art. {98} _And I doubt if the curriculum of
  any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of
  what is meant by culture, as this old Trivium and Quadrivium does."_
  (Italics mine.)

Of course Huxley says, "sometimes it may be in caricature." We must
not forget, however, that first even Huxley hesitates to say that it
is caricature, for he knows how easy it is to be mistaken in our
estimation of the true significance of an old-time mode of thought,
and then, too, he knew comparatively how little we were sure of the
real thoughts and conclusions of these men of the olden time because
of defective sympathy and even defective knowledge of their work. Our
knowledge in this matter has greatly increased since his time. As a
matter of fact, the more we know about these old masters and the
mediaeval universities the less are we likely to think of their work
as lacking in seriousness in any sense. The quarter of a century that
has elapsed since Huxley so cogently urged this at Aberdeen has
brought many facts unknown to us before and has shown us what good
work, even in the physical sciences, was accomplished in these
old-time universities.

For instance, nothing is more common in the mouths of certain kinds of
scholars than the expressions of wonder as to why men did not study
nature more assiduously before our time. Here is a magnificent open
book full of the most alluring lessons which any one may study for
himself, and that somehow it is presumed men neglected {99} down to
our time. We are the age of nature students, and preceding times are
looked at askance for having neglected the opportunities that lay so
invitingly open to them in this subject. It has always been a wonder
to me how people dare to talk this way. Our old literatures are full
of observations on nature. In my book on "The Popes and Science" I
take Dante as a typical product of the universities of the thirteenth
century, and show without any difficulty as it seems to me, that there
is no poet of the modern time who can draw figures from nature which
demand even a detailed knowledge of nature with so much confidence as
Dante. He knows the most intimate details about the birds, about many
animals, about the ways of flowers, about children, describes some
experiments in science, has a wide knowledge of astronomy and in
general is familiar with nature quite as much if not more than any
modern writer not _ex professo_ a naturalist. He describes the
metamorphosis of insects, how the ants communicate with one another,
knows the secrets of the bees and exhibits wide knowledge of the
secrets of bird life.

The presumption that people did not study nature in the olden time is
quite unjustified. They did not write long books about trivial
subjects of nature-study. They did not conclude that because they were
seeing something for the first time, that that was the first time in
the world's history it had ever been seen. They were gentle, {100}
kindly scholars who assumed that others had eyes and saw too, and as
fortunately there was no printing press there was not that hurried
rushing into print, with superficial observations and still more
superficial conclusions, which has characterized so much of our recent
literature of nature-study and that has been so well dubbed "nature
faking." Of course we have had faking of the same kind in nearly
everything else: we have history faking in our supposed historical
romances, science faking in our pseudo-science, science-history faking
in our ready presumption that the men of the olden time could not have
had our interests, and, above all--may I now say it?--in our cheap
conclusion that there must have been some reason for their lack of
interest in science, and then the assumption without anything further,
that it must have been because of the Church.

Just as soon as there is question of there having been any serious
scientific study during the Middle Ages, in the sense of observations
in physical science, investigation of the physical phenomena of nature
and the drawing of conclusions from them and the evolving of laws,
there are a large number of people who consider themselves very well
informed, who will at once object that this must be quite absurd,
since at this time Lord Chancellor Bacon had not as yet laid down the
great foundations of the physical sciences in his discussion of
inductive reasoning. I have already {101} ventured to suggest, in the
address on "The First Modern University," how utterly ridiculous any
such notion is. I have quoted Lord Macaulay and Huxley as ridiculing
those who entertained such an idea. Here I may be permitted to recur
to the subject by quotations from the same authorities. I have often
found that anything I myself said in this matter was at once
considered as quite incredible, since my feelings were entirely too
favorable toward the Middle Ages and then my religious affiliations
are somehow supposed to unfit me for scientific thinking. Fortunately
Macaulay and Huxley have expressed themselves in this matter even more
vigorously than I would be likely to, and so I may simply quote them.

As Lord Macaulay wrote in his well-known essay:

  "The vulgar notion about Bacon we take to be this, that he invented
  a new method of arriving at truth, which method is called induction,
  and that he detected some fallacy in the syllogistic reasoning which
  had been in vogue before his time. This notion is as well founded as
  that of the people who, in the Middle Ages, imagined that Virgil was
  a great conjurer. Many who are far too well informed to talk such
  extravagant nonsense entertain what we think incorrect notions as to
  what Bacon really effected in this matter."

Still more apposite is what Professor Huxley has to say. Discoursing
on the phenomena of {102} organic nature, after warning his auditors
not to suppose that scientific investigation is "some kind of modern
black art," he adds: "I say that you might easily gather this
impression from the manner in which many persons speak of scientific
inquiry, or talk about inductive and deductive philosophy, or the
principles of the 'Baconian philosophy.' To hear people talk about the
great Chancellor--and a very great man he certainly was--you would
think that it was he who had invented science, and that there was no
such thing as sound reasoning before the time of Queen Elizabeth.

  "There are many men who, though knowing absolutely nothing of the
  subject with which they may be dealing, wish nevertheless to damage
  the author of some view with which they think fit to disagree. What
  they do is not to go and learn something about the subject; . . .
  but they abuse the originator of the view they question, in a
  general manner, and wind up by saying that, 'After all, you know,
  the principles and method of this author are totally opposed to the
  canons of the Baconian philosophy.' Then everybody applauds, as a
  matter of course, and agrees that it must be so."

Lord Bacon himself so little understood true science that he condemned
Copernicanism because it failed to solve the problems of the universe,
and condemned Dr. Gilbert, the great founder in Magnetism, whose work
was the best {103} exemplification of inductive science of that time.
Of course Bacon did not invent science nor its methods. He was only a
publicist popularizing them. They had existed in the minds of all
logical thinkers from the beginning. His great namesake, Friar Bacon,
much better deserves to be thought a pioneer in modern physical
science than the chancellor,--and he was a mediaeval university man.

We are prone to think of the old-time universities as classical or
literary schools with certain limited post-graduate features, more or
less distantly smacking of science. The reason for this is easy to
understand. It is because out of such classical and literary colleges
our present universities, with their devotion to science, were
developed or transformed during the last generation or two. It is to
be utterly ignorant of mediaeval education, however, to think that the
classical and literary schools are types of university work in the
Middle Ages. The original universities of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries paid no attention to language at all except
inasmuch as Latin, the universal language, was studied in order that
there might be a common ground of understanding. Latin was not studied
at all, however, from its literary side; to style as such the
professors in the old mediaeval universities and the writers of the
books of the time paid no attention. Indeed it was because of this
neglect of style in literature and of the niceties of classical Latin
that the university men of recent centuries before our own, {104} so
bitterly condemned the old, mediaeval teachers and were so utterly
unsympathetic with their teaching and methods. We, however, have come
once more into a time when style means little, indeed, entirely too
little, and when the matter is supposed to be everything, and we
should have more sympathy with our older forefathers in education who
were in the same boat. We have inherited traditions of
misunderstanding in this matter, but we should know the reasons for
them and then they will disappear.

As a matter of fact, exactly the same thing happened in our modern
change of university interests during the latter half of the
nineteenth century as happened in the latter half of the fifteenth
century in Italy, and in the next century throughout Europe. With the
fall of Constantinople the Greeks were sent packing by the Turks and
they carried with them into Italy manuscripts of the old Greek
authors, examples of old Greek art and the classic spirit of devotion
to literature as such. A new educational movement termed the study of
the humanities had been making some way in Italy during the preceding
half-century before the fall of Constantinople, but now interest in it
came with a rush. The clergymen, the nobility, even the women of the
time became interested in the New Learning, as it was called. Private
schools of various kinds were opened for the study of it, and
everybody considered that it was the one thing that people who {105}
wanted to keep up to date, smart people, for they have always been
with us, should not fail to be familiar with. The humanities became
the fashion, just as science became the fashion in the nineteenth
century. Fashion has a wonderfully pervasive power and it runs in
cycles in intellectual matters as well as in clothes.

The devotees of the New Learning demanded a place for it in the
universities. University faculties perfectly confident, as university
faculties always are, that what they had in the curriculum was quite
good enough, and conservative enough to think that what had been good
enough for their forefathers was surely good enough also for this
generation, refused to admit the new studies. For a considerable
period, therefore, the humanities had to be pursued in institutions
apart from the universities. Indeed it was not until the Jesuits
showed how valuable classical studies might be made for developmental
purposes and true education that they were admitted into the
universities.

Note the similarity with certain events in our own time in all this.
Two generations ago the universities refused to admit science. They
were training men in their undergraduate departments by means of
classical literature. They argued exactly as did the old mediaeval
universities with regard to the new learning, that they had no place
for science. Science had to be learned, then, in separate institutions
for a time. The scientific {106} educational movement made its way,
however, until finally it was admitted into the university curricula.
Now we are in the midst of an educational period when the classics are
losing in favor so rapidly that it seems as though it would not be
long before they would be entirely replaced by the sciences, except,
in so far as those are concerned who are looking for education in
literature and the classic languages for special purposes.

It will be interesting, then, to trace the story of the old mediaeval
universities as far as the science in their curriculum was concerned,
because it represents much more closely than we might have imagined,
or than is ordinarily thought, the preceding phase of education to the
classical period which we have seen go out of fashion to so great an
extent in the last two generations. We shall readily find that at
least as much time was devoted in the mediaeval universities to the
physical sciences as in our own, and that the culture sciences filled
up the rest of the curriculum. Philosophy, which occupied so prominent
a place in older university life, was not only a culture science, but
physical science as well, as indeed the name natural philosophy, which
remained almost down to our day, attests.

Physical science was not the sole object of these mediaeval
institutions of learning, but they were thoroughly scientific. The
main object of the universities in the olden time was to secure such
{107} discussion of the problems of man's relation to the universe, to
his Creator, to his fellow-creatures and to the material world as
would enable him to appreciate his rights and duties and to use his
powers. Huxley declared that the trivium and quadrivium, the seven
liberal arts studied in the mediaeval universities, probably
demonstrate a clearer and more generous comprehension of what is meant
by culture than the curriculum of any modern university. Language was
learned through grammar, the science of language. Reasoning was
learned through logic, the science of reasoning; the art of expression
through rhetoric, a combination of art and science with applications
to practical life. Mathematics was studied with a zeal and a success
that only those who know the history of mediaeval mathematics can at
all appreciate. Cantor, the German historian of mathematics, in
hundreds of pages of a large volume, has told the story of the
development of mathematics during the centuries before the
Renaissance, that is from the thirteenth to the fifteenth, in a way
that makes it very clear that the teaching at the universities in this
subject was not dry and sterile, but eminently productive, successful
in research, and with constant additions to knowledge such as live
universities ought to make.

Then there was astronomy, metaphysics, theology, music and law and
medicine. The science of law was developed and, above all, great {108}
collections of laws made for purposes of scientific study. Of
astronomy every one was expected to know much, of medicine we shall
have considerable to say hereafter, but in the meantime it is well to
recall that these mediaeval centuries maintained a high standard of
medical education and brought some wonderful developments in the
sciences allied to medicine and above all in their applications to
therapeutics. Surgery never reached so high a plane of achievement
down to our own time, as during the period when it was studied so
faithfully and developed so marvellously at the mediaeval
universities. It was inasmuch as a knowledge of physics was needed for
the development of metaphysics that the mediaeval schoolmen devoted
themselves to the study of nature. They turned with as much ardor and
devotion as did Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century, to the
accumulation of such information with regard to nature as would enable
them to draw conclusions, establish general principles and lay firm
foundations for reasonings with regard to the creature and the
Creator. It is, above all, this phase of mediaeval teaching work, of
the schoolmen's ardent interest that is misunderstood, often ignored
and only too frequently misrepresented in the modern time.

For instance, in the discussion of the status of matter in the
universe the scholastics and notably Thomas Aquinas had come to the
conclusion that matter was absolutely indestructible. He {109} even
went so far as to say that man could not destroy it, and God would not
annihilate it. _Nihil omnino in nihilum redigetur_--nothing at all
will ever be reduced to nothingness, was his dictum as the conclusion
of a course of lectures on this subject. He saw the changes in matter
all round him that were supposed to be destructive, the burnings, the
vaporizations, the solutions, the putrefactions and all the rest, but
he knew that these only brought changes in matter and not destruction
of the underlying substance. For him, as for all the scholastic
philosophers, matter was composed of two principles, as they were
called. One of these was prime matter and the other form. To prime
matter, one of these, matter or substance owed all its negative
qualities, inertia and the like. To form, the dynamic element or
principle, it owed all its individuating qualities. Prime matter was
the same in all things. Form was the energy or bundle of energies, the
dynamic principle, as we have said, which entering into prime matter,
made the different kinds of matter that we speak of.

It is extremely interesting to compare this old scholastic teaching
with the modern ideas of the composition of matter and especially the
notions which have come to us from researches in physical chemistry in
recent years. Our scientists no longer believe that we have some
eighty different elements, essentially different kinds of matter, that
cannot by any chance or process be changed one {110} into another. We
have seen one form of elementary matter changing into another, helium
emanations becoming radium, have heard of Professor Ramsay's
transmutation of various elements, and have about come to the
conclusion that in the radio-active substances we have a wonderful
transmuting power. A prominent American professor of chemistry
declared not long since that he would like to treat a large quantity
of lead ore in order to extract from it all the silver which so
constantly occurs in connection with it in the natural state, and then
having put the lead ore aside for a score of years, would like to
examine it again, confident that he would find traces of silver in it
once more, which had developed as a consequence of the radio-activity
present in the substance and which is constantly changing lead into
silver in small quantities. Newton's declaration, when he saw crystals
of gold in connection with copper, that gold had been developed from
the copper, seemed very foolish a century ago, but no one would
consider it so at the present moment.

We are prone to think that these old mediaeval philosophers accepting
to some extent at least the philosopher's stone with its supposed
capacity for changing baser metals into precious, and with their
acceptance of the transmutation of substances, cannot have had any
real scientific bent of mind. We are coming to the realization,
however, that in many ways by pure reasoning, in {111} conjunction
with such observation as they had at hand, they anticipated our most
recent conclusions in very marvellous ways. We know now that radium,
or at least radio-active substances, represent the philosopher's stone
of the olden time. We are not surprised at the transmutation of metals
and of substances, on the contrary, we are looking for it.

I remember once stating the old theory of matter and form to a
distinguished professor in chemistry in this country, and he was
struck by the similarity of it to what are the present accepted ideas
of the composition of matter. He asked why this teaching was not more
generally known. I had to tell him that in every Catholic school of
philosophy, it was taught as a basic doctrine, and that far from being
concealed it was the very touchstone of Catholic philosophic teaching,
and had often been the subject of deprecation and contemptuous remarks
on the part of those who thought that it represented somewhat foolish
old-fashioned teaching handed down to us from the backwardness and
abysm of time.

We have demonstrated the indestructibility of matter in modern times
by experimental methods. The mediaeval schoolmen reached similar
conclusions, however, by strict reasoning from the premises of
observation that they had in the olden times. We may be apt to think
that they knew very little about nature and the details of physical
science, but that will be only because we do not {112} know their
great books. Albertus Magnus is a typical example of a renowned
teacher of the thirteenth century who was, however, at the same time a
highly respected member of his order, holding important official
positions in it and thoroughly honored and respected by his
ecclesiastical superiors so that he was made a bishop, yet writing
volumes of observation with regard to nearly every phase of physical
science. A list of his books reads like a section of a catalogue of a
library of physical science. I have told the story of his career in
the second series of "Catholic Churchmen in Science," but the names of
his volumes are sufficient to show what sort of work he was doing. He
has volumes on chemistry, botany, on physics, on cosmography, on
animal locomotion, on respiration, on generation and corruption, on
age and death and life, on phases of psychology, the soul, sense and
sensation, memory, sleep, the intellect and many another subject.
Those who think that there was no attention paid to science in the
Middle Ages must know nothing at all of Albertus Magnus' work.

Above all, those who talk thus are entirely ignorant of all that Roger
Bacon did. Roger Bacon himself was a student of the University of
Paris. He was a professor there. He corresponded with the scientists
of Europe quite as frequently or at least as significantly as
professors of the modern time do with each other. Students submitted
their discoveries to him. We {113} have Peregrinus' letter to him with
regard to magnetism and electricity and know of others. We have his
own books, in which he treats not only the scientific problems, but
inventions and applied science of all kinds. At the present time his
interest in aeronautics has a special appeal to us. He was sure that
men would sometime make a successful airship. He even thought that he
could make one himself, but his experiments proved unsuccessful. His
theory of it was very interesting. In his work "De Secretis Artis et
Naturae Operibus" he writes that a machine could be constructed in
which a man sitting in the centre might move wings by means of a crank
and thus, quite after the fashion of birds, fly through the air. It
was he who wrote that the time would come when carriages would move
along the roads without men or horses to pull them. At the moment he
was experimenting with gunpowder. He realized, therefore, that
sometime men would harness explosives and use them for motor purposes.
That is, of course, just what we are doing with gasolene.

He suggested that boats would run over the water without oars and
without sails. He was anticipating our motor boat. He taught that
light moves with a definite rate of velocity, though that fact was not
demonstrated for several centuries after his time. He worked out most
of the theory of lenses as we have it at the present time. He was sure
that experiment and {114} observation constituted the only way by
which knowledge of nature could be obtained. In this he was but
following his great teacher Albertus Magnus, who insisted that in
natural philosophy experiment alone brought sure knowledge;
_"Experimentum solum certificat in talibus."_ are his own words. Roger
Bacon's devotion to mathematics shows how thoroughly scientific was
the trend of his mind. Without mathematics he was sure that one could
not reach scientific knowledge, or that what one did get was without
certainty. Some of his expressions in this matter are strikingly
modern. It is no wonder that his writings and teachings were so great
a surprise to his generation that the Pope ordered him to write out
his knowledge in books. Without this order we would not have had Roger
Bacon's great works, for his vow of poverty voluntarily taken forbade
him to be possessed of sufficient money to enable him to purchase
writing materials, which were then very expensive.

Indeed the mathematics of the mediaeval universities is the best proof
of the seriousness of their devotion to science and, may it also be
said, of their success. Cantor, in his "History of Mathematics," and
he is the great authority in the matter, devotes nearly 100 pages of
his second volume to the mathematicians of the thirteenth century
alone, two of whom, Leonard of Pisa and Jordanus Nemorarius, did so
much in arithmetic, in the theory of numbers, and in geometry, {115}
as to work a revolution in mathematics. They had great disciples like
John of Holywood (probably a town near Dublin), Johannes Campanus and
others. No wonder that at the end of the century Roger Bacon said,
"For without mathematics nothing worth knowing in philosophy can be
obtained," and again, "for he who knows not mathematics cannot know
any other science; what is more, he cannot discover his own ignorance
or find its proper remedy." The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw
even more important work done. Cantor has half a dozen men in the
fifteenth century to whom he devotes more than twenty-five pages each.
How the place of this in mediaeval teaching can have escaped the
notice of those who insist so much on the neglect of science during
the Middle Ages, is hard to understand. This alone would convict them
of ignorance of what they are talking about.

The educational genius of the great university century, the
thirteenth, the man who influenced his contemporaries and succeeding
generations more than any other, was Thomas Aquinas, to whom the
Church, for his knowledge and goodness, gave the title of saint. If
any further proof that these centuries were interested in science were
needed, or that the universities in which he was the leading light as
scholar and professor in the thirteenth century, and as the great
master to whom all looked reverentially after, were developing
scientific studies, it would be found in {116} his works. Philosophy
is developed scientifically in his "Contra Gentes" and theology,
scientifically in his great "Summa." It is the very austerity of the
scientific qualities of these books that have made them forbidding for
many modern readers, who, therefore, have failed to understand the
scientific spirit of the time. St. Thomas Aquinas, however, was, as I
suggested at the beginning of this, deeply interested in every form of
information with regard to what we now call physical science. He
evidently drank in with avidity all that had been observed with regard
to living creatures and, when we come to analyze his works with care
and read his books with the devotion of his own students, we find many
anticipations of what is most modern in our science.

The indestructibility of matter, matter and form, that is the doctrine
of the unity of the basis of matter, the conservation of energy in the
sense that the forms of matter change but do not disappear, all these
were commonplaces in his thought and teaching. I have recently had
occasion to point out how close he came to that thought in modern
biology which is probably considered to be one of our most modern
contributions to the theory of evolution. It is expressed by the
formula of Herbert Spencer, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."
According to this the completed human being repeats in the course of
its development the history of the race, that is to say, the varying
phases of foetal development {117} in the human embryo, from the
single cell in which it originates up to the perfect being as it is
born into the world, retrace the history by which from the single-cell
being man has gradually developed. The whole theory of evolution is
supposed by many people to be modern, but of course it is not. This
particular phase of it, however, is thought surely to be modern. It is
sometimes spoken of as the fundamental law of biogeny. In recent years
serious doubts have been thrown on it, but with that we have nothing
to do here.

It is very curious to find, however, that St. Thomas, in his teaching
with regard to the origin and development of the human being, says,
almost exactly, what the most ardent supporters of this so-called
fundamental biogenetic law proclaimed in recent years. He says that
"the higher a form is in the scale of being and the farther it is
removed from mere material form, the more intermediate forms must be
passed through before the finally perfect form is reached. Therefore,
in the generation of animal and man--these having the most perfect
forms--there occur many intermediate forms in generations and
consequently destruction, because the generation of one being is the
destruction of another." St. Thomas does not hesitate to draw his
conclusions from this doctrine without hesitation. He proclaims that
the human material is first animated by a vegetative soul or principle
of life, and then by an animal soul and only ultimately, when the
matter has {118} been properly prepared for it, by a rational soul. He
said:

  "The vegetative soul, therefore, which is first in the embryo, while
  it lives the life of a plant, is destroyed, and there succeeds a
  more perfect soul, which is at once nutrient and sentient, and for
  that time the embryo lives the life of an animal: upon the
  destruction of this there succeeds the rational soul, infused from
  without."

His discussion of the position of the Church and of faith to science
is extremely interesting, because here once more he faces a modern
problem. Aquinas was very sensitive with regard to the imposition upon
Christians of things which supposedly they had to believe on the score
of faith, though they were really not of faith at all. Some of his
expressions in this matter are very strong and he was especially fond
of quoting St. Augustine, who was very emphatic on this point. One of
these typical passages deserves to find a place here because, while
the word philosophy is used, it is evidently science in our modern
sense of the word that is intended. Augustine talks of what the
philosophers have said of the heavens or the stars and the motion of
the sun and moon, meaning of course the astronomers, who were in the
old days classed as natural philosophers. This passage, then, which
contains the opinions of the two greatest teachers of the Church in
the West may well serve as a guide for those who are interested in
science, and a warning for those who would {119} obtrude faith too far
into scientific questions, and thus limit investigation and hamper
that freedom of intellect which is so important for the development of
science. St. Thomas said in his introduction to the reply to Master
John of Vercelli:

  "I have endeavored to reply but with this protest at the outset,
  that many of these articles do not pertain to the teachings of
  faith, but rather to the dogmas of the philosophers. But it works a
  great injury either to assert or deny as belonging to sacred
  doctrine such things as do not bear upon the doctrine of piety. For
  Augustine says, 'When I hear certain Christians ignorant of those
  things (namely, what philosophers have said of the heavens, or the
  stars, or the motion of the sun and moon) or misunderstanding them,
  I look with patience upon such men: nor do I see any reason to
  hinder them, when of thee, Lord Creator of all things, they do not
  believe unworthy things, if perhaps they be ignorant of the
  structure, and condition of corporal creatures. But they are a
  hindrance if they think these things belong to the very doctrine of
  piety; and more, pertinaciously, dare to affirm that of which they
  are ignorant.' But that they may be the cause of injury Augustine
  shows. 'It is very disgraceful,' he says, 'and pernicious and
  especially to be avoided, that a Christian speaking of these things
  as though according to Christian teaching should so rave that any
  infidel may hear; so that, as it is said, seeing him altogether in
  the wrong, he may {120} scarcely contain his mirth. And it is not so
  hurtful that one man should be seen to err, as that our writers are
  believed by those who are without [the Church] to have such
  opinions, and to the ruin of those whose salvation is our care they
  are scorned and contemned as unlearned.' Whence it seems safer to me
  that those things which philosophers have commonly held, and are not
  repugnant to our faith, should neither be asserted as dogmas of
  faith, although at times they may be introduced under the names of
  the philosophers, nor so denied as contrary to the faith, as to give
  occasion to the wise of this world of contemning the teaching of the
  faith."

Is it any wonder that Professor Saintsbury of the University of
Edinburgh, whose training in the old Scotch universities has given him
a breadth of sympathy not common in our time, and whose wide knowledge
of the literature of that period as well as its philosophy and
education, and whose training in the discussion of the criticism of
all time in his "History of Criticism" has made his opinion of special
value, should have sympathetically turned to these old teachers and
deprecated a little bitterly the modern attitude towards them? He
said:

  "Yet there has always in generous souls who have some tincture of
  philosophy, subsisted a curious kind of sympathy and yearning over
  the work of these generations of mainly disinterested scholars, who,
  whatever they were, were {121} thorough, and whatever they could not
  do, could think. And there have even, in these latter days, been
  some graceless ones who have asked whether the science of the
  nineteenth century, after an equal interval, will be of any more
  positive value--whether it will not have even less comparative
  interest than that which appertains to the scholasticism of the
  thirteenth."

I have always considered, however, that the easiest way to show the
modern student of science how supremely scientific in his temper was
St. Thomas, is to quote for him the passage from that great teacher
with regard to the Resurrection. In every way, that is typically
modern. St. Thomas faces the question that after death men's bodies
decay, the material of them is taken up and used in many other living
beings, so that how can we dare to believe that we shall rise again on
the last day with the same bodies that we now have? St. Thomas
discusses this knotty problem straightforwardly and solves it more
satisfactorily, even for all the knowledge that we have of it now,
than has ever been done.

  "What does not bar numerical unity in a man while he lives on
  uninterruptedly clearly can be no bar to the identity of the arisen
  man with the man that was. In a man's body while he lives there are
  not only the same parts in respect of matter, but also in respect of
  species. In respect of matter there is a flux and reflux of parts.
  Still that fact does not bar the man's numerical unity {122} from
  the beginning to the end of his life. The form and species of the
  several parts continue throughout life, but the matter of the parts
  is dissolved by the natural heat, and new matter accrues through
  nourishment. Yet the man is not numerically different by the
  difference of his component parts at different ages, although it is
  true that the material composition of the man at one stage of his
  life is not his material composition at another. Addition is made
  from without to the stature of a boy without prejudice to his
  identity, for the boy and the adult are numerically the same man."

The most important feature of the scientific teachings of the
mediaeval universities has been left till the last because it is the
clinching confirmation of a claim that these were essentially
scientific universities. It is to be found in the position of the
medical schools and the state of medical teaching during the Middle
Ages. So curiously has the history of education been written, and,
above all, of medical education, that to most people this would seem
to be surely the department of education which would prove just the
opposite. We have heard so much about Church opposition to anatomy and
Church opposition to surgery, of its repression of the development of
medical science and even medical art, because the Church wanted to
make people believe in the value of masses, relics and prayers--and
pay for them--that most people are quite sure that there {123} was no
medical education of any significance in the Middle Ages. Nothing
shows more clearly how viciously the history of education has been
written than the existence of such false impressions. Not only are
they utterly unfounded, but they are based on supreme ignorance of one
of the greatest periods in the history of medicine that we have in all
the world's history. Not only were the schools excellent and the
teaching progressive, but there was a fine development of medical
science and, above all, of surgery. Surgery is supposed to be
particularly the department of medicine that did not develop. We have
learned better in recent years, and now we know that there was no
greater period in the history of surgery than that from 1200 to 1400
when, alas! following so-called history, we used to think there was no
surgery.

The first question that any one who knows anything about the subject
asks with regard to the progress in medicine of a particular time or
country is, what was the standard of its medical education? What was
the standard of admission to the medical schools, how many years of
medical studies were required? To this question the Middle Ages have a
wonderful answer that has not been realized until recent years. We now
have Frederick II's famous law for the regulation of the practice of
medicine and the maintaining of standards in medical schools. This law
was promulgated in the Two Sicilies, the southern part of {124} Italy
and Sicily proper. According to it no one was allowed to practise
medicine who had not studied for four years in a recognized university
and then practised for one year with a physician before receiving his
license to practise by himself. If he wanted to practise surgery he
had to spend an additional special year in the study of anatomy. The
university medical schools were graduate schools and did not admit a
student unless he had completed the undergraduate course.

Of course it may be thought that this was due entirely to the great
Emperor Frederick, who was far ahead of his time and who, therefore,
anticipated the progress of medical teaching by many centuries. We
have, however, many other documents which illustrate the state of
medical education at this time. The charters of the medical schools
were granted by the Popes and were very explicit in what they required
of the new faculties in order that standards might be maintained. Pope
John XXII, for instance, at the beginning of the fourteenth century,
issued charters for medical schools at Perugia and Cahors. He required
that there should be four years of medical study and three years of
preliminary work. He went into details to secure the maintenance of
standards. The original faculties of these schools would all have to
be doctors in medicine from either Paris or Bologna, and it must be
their duty to establish in the new schools the standards of their
{125} Almae Matres. Examinations were to be conducted under oath, men
were not to be granted degrees unless they deserved them, the votes of
professors rejecting candidates or graduating them were to be under
oath-bound secrecy, so as to have them absolutely free from personal
influence, and every precaution was taken to secure the highest
possible standards.

It was as a consequence of their direct attachment to these old
mediaeval medical schools that the medical schools founded here in
America in the sixteenth century at once began with high standards.
Three years of preliminary work was required and four years of
medicine. In the United States no preliminary requirements were
demanded; and for a full century only two years of medical study,
which really consisted of but two terms of four months each, was the
requirement. The old mediaeval medical schools were originally
attached to the universities, and it is a well-known rule in the
history of education that whenever the medical schools are independent
then standards are sure to be low. Whenever the university controls
the medical school and it is a real graduate department, then
standards of admission and of graduation are properly maintained. It
is surprising to think that the old mediaeval universities should be
able to give us lessons in this matter and should put us to shame for
our slip-shod nineteenth-century medical education in the United
States, but this is a simple fact. Contrast {126} the South American
countries where the mediaeval traditions with which they were founded
constrained them to give four, five and even six years to medicine
before granting a degree. Go a step further and see how devoted to
science were the Universities of Lima (Peru) and Mexico, centuries
before we did any serious scientific work in the United States, and
all because they were direct descendants of the old mediaeval
universities.

The feeling of certain modern educators would be that it did not
matter how much time these mediaeval universities gave to medicine
since, after all, they had nothing of any value to teach in medicine.
Even educated people have been led to believe that there was nothing
in medicine and, above all, in the surgery of those times to be of any
value. Probably no opinion is more foolishly ignorant or more
ridiculously absurd than this, though it is a commonplace among people
who are sure they know something about history, and, above all, among
those who consider themselves authorities in the history of education,
and of the development of science. In surgery a magnificent
development was made at this time of which I shall have something to
say later. In medicine there was much less anticipation of our modern
progress, but even here there was much that demands our respect. One
of the university men, Simon of Genoa, worked out the dosage of opium
and indicated its uses. Anodyne drugs were {127} employed much more
generally and successfully than we are apt to think; various methods
of anaesthesia, one of them by inhalation, of which I shall say more
when talking of surgery, were invented and a large number of drugs and
simples were experimented with. Down at Montpellier Bernard Gordon
suggested red light for smallpox.

This is not much of a record, perhaps, but we must not forget what
Professor Richet, the Director of the Physiological Laboratory of the
University of Paris, said not long since in an article on "Physicians
and Medicine" in _La Revue de Deux Mondes._ It is startling but
chasteningly true. "The therapeutics of any generation has always been
quite absurd to the second succeeding generation." Indeed it is one of
the almost disheartening things in the history of medicine to see how
treatments come in, are widely accepted and hailed as great advances
in therapeutics and then gradually disappear. They bled a great deal
and they purged not a little, in accordance with the teaching in the
medical schools of the universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, but then they bled a great deal and purged a great deal
more, according to the teaching of the medical schools of the
beginning of the nineteenth century. There have been many periods in
the interval when purging and bleeding were, and very properly, not
nearly so popular.

It was in preventive medicine particularly that {128} these
progressive medical men of the early university days secured their
triumphs. They made separate hospitals for the lepers all over Europe,
and by segregation succeeded in wiping out that disease, though it was
as widely spread as tuberculosis in our day and presented just as
serious a problem. Indeed the most encouraging incentive for our
present tuberculosis campaign is drawn by many authorities from the
experience with leprosy, which was eventually obliterated as an
endemic popular disease, by strict segregation methods. These same
generations created special hospitals for erysipelas and thus
prevented the spread of this disease in the ordinary hospitals, where
it used to be so serious a factor for morbidity if not for mortality.
Men forgot this later and the disease became a serious problem once
more in all the hospitals of even a generation ago. The hospital
organization worked out by these university men is the finest jewel in
the crown of their accomplishment as applied scientists. Pope Innocent
III, himself a University of Paris man, founded the Santo Spirito
Hospital in Rome, summoning for that purpose the best authority on
hospitals in Europe, Guy of Montpellier, and then required the bishops
of the world to erect similar hospitals in their dioceses. This was
done, and it is Virchow, whose sympathies were anything but favorable
to the Popes, who has been most loud in his praise of the wonderful
hospital organization of these centuries. Every town in {129} Europe
of 5,000 inhabitants or more had a hospital, and there were hospitals
in many of the smaller towns.

It would be easy to think that these hospitals were rudely built, were
badly ventilated, were ill-arranged and, above all, were likely to be
houses for the perpetuation of disease rather than for the regaining
of health. We are prone to think that we are the first generation to
solve the problem of hospital construction. We know what
poorly-constructed, badly-planned institutions were the hospitals of
three generations ago. What, then, must have been the hospital
buildings of centuries ago? This argument has no place in history; the
worst hospitals in the world and in history were erected at the end of
the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Some of
the best hospitals ever constructed date from the thirteenth,
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This was a time when great
architects were successfully solving the construction problems for
cathedrals, municipal buildings, colleges and the like, and they
solved them quite as successfully for hospitals. Some of these
hospitals were models in their way. One of them, built toward the end
of the thirteenth century, by the sister of St. Louis, Marguerite of
Bourgogne, with its large windows high in the walls, in single-story
buildings, with arrangements for the segregation of patients, with the
kitchens in a separate building, with beautiful {130} frescoes on the
walls so that patients' minds might be occupied and not left to their
own often disturbing devices as with our bare wall, with a stream of
running water divided so as to pass on both sides of the hospital, is
a model of construction for all time.

It was in surgery rather than medicine, however, that these great
mediaeval university medical schools left their impress upon the
history of medicine. During the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries we have a series of wonderful teachers of surgery, whose
achievements we know not by tradition nor by fragments of their
writings, but by the text-books which they wrote and which constituted
the teaching for generations and sometimes for centuries after their
time. Gurlt, the great German historian of surgery, devotes some 300
pages of the first volume of his "History of Surgery" to the surgical
accomplishments of the Middle Ages. He even protests that space
compels him to abbreviate the story of what these old-time masters of
surgery did to lay the foundation of modern surgical practices. It is
a commonplace in the American writing of history that there was no
surgery at this time. President White says that, "for over a thousand
years surgery was considered dishonorable until the German Emperor
Wenceslas, in 1403, ordered that it should be held in honor again."
The two centuries immediately preceding this date represent the {131}
greatest period in the history of surgery down to our own time, and
because of its originality probably greater in real achievement than
even our vaunted age.

It is sometimes the custom to say that this surgery was derived from
the Arabs. This is supposed to rob the mediaeval universities of any
prestige that may come to them for this marvellous progress. Gurlt,
however, in his "History of Surgery," in his sketch of Roger
(Ruggiero), who was the first of the great surgeons of the thirteenth
century, who taught at the Italian universities, says: "Though Arabian
writings on surgery had been brought over to Italy by Constantine
Africanus 100 years before Roger's time, these exercised no influence
over Italian surgery in the next century, and there is not a trace of
the influence of the Arabs to be found in Roger's work." When Gurlt
says this it is because he has deliberately studied the question, and
we can be absolutely sure, therefore, that whatever we find in surgery
at this time comes to us from these great mediaeval universities
themselves, and is not imported from abroad.

After Roger, who was at Bologna for a time after having been in Paris,
and who then became a Papal physician, there are a series of great
names that deserve to be mentioned. Four names are connected together
by association as master and pupil for what may be termed four
generations of surgical progress. From the birth {132} of the first to
the death of the last represents about 100 years. That 100 years is a
gloriously fruitful century in the history of surgery. The first of
the group is William of Salicet, of whom Professor Clifford Allbutt,
the Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge, in his
address on the "Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery to the
End of the Sixteenth Century," delivered by special invitation at the
Congress of Arts and Sciences at the World's Fair in St. Louis in
1904, has the highest praise. Allbutt says: "Like Lanfranc and the
other great surgeons of the Italian tradition, and unlike Franco and
Pare, William had the advantage of the liberal university education of
Italy; but like Pare and Wurtz, he had a large practical experience in
hospitals and on the battlefield and fully recognized that surgery
cannot be learned from books only." Allbutt praises him and rightly
for his careful notes of cases and then tells us something of his
accomplishments in surgery. He says: "William discovered that dropsy
may be due to a _durities renum_ six centuries before Bright; he
substituted the knife for the Arabist abuse of the cautery; _he
investigated the causes of the failure of healing by first intention_
(Italics ours), he described the danger of wounds of the neck; he
sutured divided nerves; he forwarded the diagnosis of suppurative
diseases of the hip; and he referred chancre and phagedaena to their
proper causes."

{133}

His pupil Lanfranc equalled his master in devotion to practical
surgery and surpassed him in his development of the great science of
medicine. Pagel, the well-known German historian of medicine, says
that, in his text-book Lanfranc has excellent chapters on the
affections of the eyes, the ears and mouth, the nose, even the teeth,
and treats of hernia in a very practical common-sense way. He warns
against the radical operation and says, in words that come home to us
with strange familiarity at the present time, that many surgeons
decide on operations too easily, not for the sake of the patient but
for the sake of the money that is in them. Lanfranc's discussion of
cystotomy, Pagel characterizes as prudent but rational, for he
considers that the operations should not be feared too much but not
delayed too long. In patients suffering from the inconvenience which
comes from large quantities of fluid in the abdomen he advises
_paracentesis abdominis_, but warns against putting the patient in
danger from such an operation without due consideration. Pagel says
that Lanfranc must be considered as one of the greatest surgeons of
the Middle Ages and the real establisher of the prestige of the French
school of surgery which maintained its prominence down to the
nineteenth century.

Lanfranc had been invited to Paris to take the chair of surgery,
because the authorities of the university wanted to add prestige to
the medical school, which was not as well known as the school {134} of
philosophy. The fame of William of Salicet had spread throughout
academic Europe, and so Lanfranc was offered the chair at the
University of Paris in order to carry his master's message there. The
next in the succession of great teachers at Paris was Mondeville, who
found less to do in an original way than his master Lanfranc and his
protomaster William, but who accomplished much for surgery. All that
he did was thrown into the shade by what was accomplished for
succeeding generations by the next in the series, Guy de Chauliac, who
studied for a time in Paris under Mondeville, though his early medical
education was obtained at Montpellier, but had also had the advantage
of spending a year in Italy at the various medical schools which were
famous at that time. These two incidents, Lanfranc's invitation to
Paris to be a teacher there from Italy more than a thousand miles
away, and Guy de Chauliac's studies in all the important universities
of Europe of the time before he took up his own work, illustrate
better than any words of ours can the ardent enthusiasm for study, the
thoroughgoing anticipation of our most modern methods in education.
Mondeville, like Chauliac, had made very nearly the same round of the
universities. It is a custom, not a chance incident, that we have to
deal with here.

Guy de Chauliac has been given the name of the father of modern
surgery. Any one who wants to see why should read the text-book on
surgery that {135} Chauliac wrote and which for two centuries after
his time (he died about the middle of the fourteenth century)
continued to be the most used text-book of surgery in the medical
schools of Europe. Chauliac, for instance, describes the treatment of
conditions within all three of the important cavities of the body, the
skull, the thorax and the abdomen. Pagel has three closely-printed
pages in small type of titles alone of subjects in surgery which
Chauliac treated with distinction. His description of instruments and
methods of operation is especially full and suggestive. He describes
the passage of a catheter, for instance, with the accuracy and
complete technique of a man who knew the difficulties of it in
complicated cases from practical experience. He even recognizes the
dangers for the patient from the presence of anatomical anomalies of
various kinds and describes certain of the more important of them. He
has very exact indications for trephining. For empyema he advises
opening of the chest and indicates where and how. He says very frankly
that in wounds of the abdomen the patient will die if the intestines
have been perforated and left untreated, and he describes a method of
suturing wounds of the intestines in order to save the patient's life.

His treatment of bone surgery and of fractures and dislocations is
especially interesting and shows how far these very practical men had
reached conclusions resembling those of our time. {136} It was in
hernia particularly that Chauliac's surgical genius manifested itself.
He operated for hernia and its radical cure, placing the patient in an
exaggerated Trendelenberg position, head down, feet fastened to a
slanting board. For such work anatomy had to be known very well, and
Chauliac had made special studies at Bologna under Bertruccio, the
successor of Mondino. Chauliac once declared that the surgeon ignorant
of anatomy carves the human body as a blind man would carve wood. Of
ulcers of all kinds Chauliac writes from a knowledge evidently derived
from experience. Of ulcers due to cancer he has much to say. He
considers them hopeless unless they can be excised at a very early
stage and the incision followed by caustics. For carcinomatous ulcers
there is not much that we can do beyond this, even in our day. It is
no wonder that the great historians of medicine have been unanimous in
praise of this wonderful scientific genius. For my lecture on
"Old-Time Medical Education," before the Johns Hopkins Historical
Club, last year, I quoted some of those opinions. Portal, for
instance, says of him, "It may be averred that Guy de Chauliac said
nearly everything that modern surgeons say and that his work is of
infinite price, but unfortunately too little pondered." Malgaigne
declares Chauliac's "Chirurgia Magna," "A masterpiece of learned and
luminous writing." Pagel says, "Chauliac represents the summit of
attainment in mediaeval {137} surgery, and he laid the foundation of
that primacy in surgery which the French maintained down to the
nineteenth century." Professor Clifford Allbutt says of Chauliac's
treatise, "This great work I have studied carefully and not without
prejudice; yet I cannot wonder that Fallopius compared the author with
Hippocrates or that John Freind calls him the prince of surgeons. The
book is rich, aphoristic, orderly and precise." In a word it has all
the qualities that are usually said to be lacking in the work of
mediaeval scientists, and it is a standing reproach to those who
ignorantly have made so little of the work of these wonderful men of
the olden time, who anticipated so many of the features of our modern
medicine and surgery that we are prone to think of as representing
climaxes in human progress, indications of a wonderful human
evolution.

Two other names of great professors of surgery deserve to be mentioned
because they make it very clear that this wonderful development of
surgery was not confined to France and Italy, but made itself felt all
over Europe. One of these is John Ypermann, a surgeon of the early
fourteenth century, of whom almost nothing was known until about
twenty-five years ago, when the Belgian historian, Broeck, brought to
light his works and gathered some details of his life. He was a pupil
of Lanfranc, and at the end of the thirteenth century studied at Paris
on a scholarship voted by his native town of Ypres, {138} which
provided maintenance and tuition fees for him at the great French
university expressly in order that he might become expert in surgery.
We are likely to think of Ypres as an unimportant town, but it was one
of the great industrial centres of Europe and one of the most
populous, busy towns of Flanders in the Middle Ages, noted for its
manufacture of linens and fine laces. The famous Cloth Hall, erected
in the thirteenth century, one of the most beautiful architectural
monuments in Europe, and one of the finest buildings of its kind in
the world, was the result of the same spirit that sent Ypermann to
Paris.

After his return Ypermann settled down in his native town and obtained
great renown not only at home, so that in that part of the country an
expert surgeon is still spoken of as an Ypermann, but he became famous
throughout all the Teutonic countries. He is the author of two books
in Flemish. One of these is on medicine. Pagel calls it an unimportant
compilation. The terms that occur in it, however, are enough to show
us how much more than we are likely to think, these old masters in
medicine discussed problems that are still puzzling us. He treats of
dropsy, rheumatism, under which occur the terms coryza

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