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fluctuated through their dense gray folds, and showed the differing immovable outlines of the purple heights. In the invisible pools below these transient lines of fire were glassed, shining through the gloom. The reflection of stars failed midway, because of the mists. There were few as yet in the sky, but as he lifted his eyes he beheld again, immea

surably splendid in the purple dusk, that sudden kindling of ethereal, palpitating, white fire which he had marked once before, that new and supernal star, strange to all familiar ways of night hitherto, shining serene, aloof, infinitely fair above the melancholy piping mountain wilds and the troublous toils of the world.

Charles Egbert Craddock.

THE TRANSMISSION OF LEARNING THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY.

WE are beginning to perceive that the • modern view of the origin of man is greatly to affect our understanding as to his true place in this world. So long as we looked upon ourselves and our fellow-beings as creatures placed upon the earth by some process other than that of natural law, it did not seem worth while to seek in the realms of nature any counsel as to the conduct of life. It is one of the most admirable and distinguishing features of our time that it has given us a new insight into the relations of man with the nature which is about him, and thereby has brought into his command new means of inquiry, and has opened vast perspectives of knowledge of which the men of other days never dreamed. We of this generation recognize a bondage, or better an alliance, with the past, which gives new understandings and makes new paths of duty clear. Nowhere else is this so evident as in the information which we have gained as to the relations of mankind to the lower life.

From this enchainment of our being with that of the lower creatures of the past, this fact to be accepted and reconciled to our thought and action, must date a new period in human affairs. Henceforth we have to adapt our conduct not only, as our forefathers did, to the commands of religion and the behests of

ordinary social law, but also to the guiding truths of that science which shows us how we have struggled through the wildernesses of the ages from the inconceivably remote time when our being came forth out of the earth and began its long upward way. Beholding ourselves here as the result of immemorial order, we have to look over the stages of our advancement to gather the important lessons of the new revelation. We are to see in what ways we can apply these teachings, so that we may with our own reason continue the development which has led us from the darkness into the light.

First among the many problems which the new dispensation of knowledge brings before us we may place that of the transmission of learning. It needs no argument to show that the immeasurably great task of handing down from generation to generation the ever-accumulating store of valuable experience imposes a heavy burden upon the men of our time, a burden which increases with each successive age. The only way in which we can hope to accomplish this work in a satisfactory manner is by studying its nature, guiding ourselves in the inquiry by the history of the processes of transmission from the beginning to the present day. In this undertaking we cannot limit ourselves to the human period; we must endeavor to

survey the records of the earlier time when life was in its lower stages, slowly yet surely making ready for its position in man. There we shall find much to instruct and guide our efforts.

In the lowest states of organization in nature, in such aggregations as the molecules, the crystals, and the celestial spheres, we find structures of great variety and much complication, with many resemblances, both in form and function, to organic species. We readily note, however, that these primitive bodies differ from those forms which we properly term organic in that they acquire from their contact with the world about them nothing which they can hand on to their successors. So far as we can discern, they remain in their unchanged primitive forms through all space and time. The molecules and the crystals of quartz formed in the earliest ages of the earth are like those produced to-day; they are probably the same in the remotest stellar sphere in which the physical conditions permit of their formation.

We easily see that it is otherwise with the organic creations. Their essential peculiarity, separating them by an infinite difference from the lower realm, consists in these facts: they manage to adjust themselves to their environment; they fit the changing conditions of the world about them; they learn from the events of life, and hand on the ever-increasing store of experience to their successors. Unlike the individualities of the mineral kingdom, these truly living species are never in successive generations the same. While successful, they are normally ever advancing; when unfortunate, they swiftly decline; success and failure are alike determined by the measure in which they profit from the experience the individuals have received from their ancestors or have themselves acquired. We also note that almost at the outset of the organic series the life of the individual form is restrict ed; it is here but for a brief time; it develops in the manner and degree deter

mined by its inheritances; it gives birth to its progeny, and passes quickly from the vital stage. The institution of successive and ordered birth and death in many distinct groups of animals and plants shows clearly that the Power which determines the order of nature, and which has lifted the scale of being upward to ourselves, finds the succession of generations a fit element in the plan. With each stage in the advance, the limitation of the time of existence, the establishment of the time of death, becomes more definite, until, in the higher creatures, the period is fixed within a narrow range.

This institution of death is apparently made in order that the species may have the advantages arising from the process. of selection, which can operate only by the rapid presentation of successive individuals to the stern election which chooses the fit to live, and the unfit to die. There can be no doubt that the advance of the organic groups has intimately and absolutely depended on this order of nature which allows each individual but a momentary dwelling on earth. At the same time, as we readily see, the interruption of death tends exceedingly to complicate the task of handing on through each form the inheritances and acquisitions of its progenitors. These difficulties are met by an almost infinite number of contrivances, of which we can note the nature only in the most general way. This array of ingenuities constitutes a distinct world, in which the observant naturalist may spend a lifetime of study, and still feel himself an essentially ignorant inquirer.

In the lower forms of animals and plants, the forefathers give to their offspring the share of inheritable gains by storing we know not how the transmissible qualities in the spore, bud, or germ. At this stage in the development of the generational system, the parent gives but the beginnings of life, the tendencies which lead towards certain shapes and functions. This is sufficient

to guide the young only a little way on their career. At a higher level, we find the egg or seed containing a considerable store of nutriment derived from the parent; this may serve to maintain the young creature for a longer period of growth, and thus permit it to attain a higher plane of structure. In our birds, this provision of food contained in the egg may amount in weight to as much as one fifth of the mother's body. By this provision, the chick is enabled, during the period when it is within the shell, to advance from the simple state of the germ to a condition of high organization. As we advance in the organic series to the creatures which give milk, we find yet more complicated and efficient ways by which the parents give physical sustenance to their young, and so lead them far onward in their bodily growth. An inspection of the vegetable kingdom shows us a similar advance in the means whereby each generation, in its prime, devotes its strength to the duty of helping the offspring to win the difficult way from birth to the adult or perfected condition of the body.

But in the animal realm the bodily contrivances by which the parents endeavor to help the offspring are surpassed by the intellectual. As soon as creatures attain to any share of intelligence, they begin in most varied ways to care for their young; in fact, their minds may be said to develop most distinctly on the side of parental care. By artfully constructed nests, by a thousand diverse attentions to the shelter, sustenance, and protection of their progeny, they lead them past the dangers which assail all weak forms, and start them fairly in the race of life. In some cases these contrivances are most singular, as in the instance of the mud wasps, which build a cell of clay, and deposit in it first a collection of spiders, each of which has been benumbed, but not killed, by stinging, and then the eggs; the whole being so managed that the young wasps feed upon

the spiders, and find in them just enough food for their needs. Philosophical naturalists have speculated how this remarkable result is brought about, but their arguments have been quite without point. In such special instances, as in the larger field of the less conspicuous phenomena which beset the observer when he surveys the realm of instincts relating to the care of offspring, he cannot, except in rare cases, hope to unveil the details of the fact. He must, however, recognize the truth that by far the larger part of animal intelligence has arisen from and been devoted to this endless effort to convey to the young the goods which have been won by their predecessors of the species.

Although this effort to bridge the gap which death makes in the life of the kind is one of the most insistent in the lower forms of life, it attains in the higher races of our own species a dignity and importance which are unapproached elsewhere in this world. In these, as in other respects, man, though akin to the more ancient and lowlier creatures, so far transcends them that by the upward step he enters into a new realm. Among the inferior animals, there is rarely any considerable store of inheritances, material or intellectual, which can be handed on from the individuals in their prime to those who are to be their successors on the stage. They give their lives to the work, but they have, as compared with man, but little to hand on.

With the most primitive men, the problem of inheritance is nearly as simple as with the highest of their animal predecessors. They have little beside their habits and traditions which can be transmitted to their progeny. They have no material wealth; even the weapons and ornaments of the dead are usually buried or burned with the body. Yet even in this social station we find the beginning of that attention to the task of transmitting the learning which the generations have accumulated. Thus, among our

American Indians as first seen by Europeans, there was practically no private wealth, and little trace of a system by which goods could be passed even from parent to child; but the knowledge which they had gathered from their observation of nature, an extensive and curious body of information, was carefully treasured and skillfully handed down to the youths of the tribe. There were orders of priests whose duty it was to pass on the traditional customs, the songs and tales. There were societies, which in a way resembled our masonic and other fraternities, whose purpose it was to maintain and extend what we may well call the literature of the primitive people.

The evidence clearly shows that the first wealth was not that of goods, but that which depends upon and affords culture. It was indeed at a relatively late stage in the history of our kind that the devices for amassing and transmitting the ordinary forms of property were invented. The teacher, in the largest sense of the word, was the first of the classes to be separated from the mass of men for particular duties connected with the common store of the people. It is true that, as the keeper and transmitter of knowledge, he was also the priest. These two functions were naturally and for a long time associated. We may with truth say that only during the present century have they been to any extent separated among our own people. The merchant, the banker, the lawyer, those agents engaged in the problems arising from the transmission of tangible property, began to find their place in society when it took on the civilized form; like the goods with which they deal, they are things of yesterday in the history of mankind.

From the simple beginnings of the task of transmitting learning by special teachers, the process has been steadfastly developing with the advance of civilization. For a time the greater part of the deliberately continued teaching was left to the priestly class, and was limited to the

traditions of religion and the simple arts and learning, such as reading and the elements of number. With the creation of literature the tasks of the teacher began rapidly to increase, and with the advent of natural science his functions became vastly more extensive and important. In the Elizabethan age it was still possible for a learned man to attain something like mastery of all the arts and sciences. A youth could look to a single teacher for guidance from the beginnings of his education to the time when he entered the world fairly provided with the more valuable learning of the earlier ages. An "Admirable Crichton," a man masterful in all the arts and sciences and skilled in all polite learning, was then possible, as he has not been in the later centuries.

To the naturalist, the devices which men have instinctively invented in order to accomplish the transmission of learning are most interesting, for the reason that they are framed on the same general principles as those by which the ever-increasing needs for the work of the organic body are provided for. In this natural process, we observe that the organism which in the lower state performs all its simple yet important functions indifferently with every portion of its frame, gradually, with its elevation in the scale of being, delegates these several duties to particular parts or organs which do their appointed tasks independently, yet under the control of the whole being. Thus, the senses, though acting individually, are associated in their work by the brain which presides over them: they are at once individual parts and members of a society in which they are coöperators. So, too, in that other and vaster organism, which we term the state, civilization, or humanity, according as we view it, a structure which, though invisible and elusive, is still perfectly real, the separate functions are united in their action, so that the whole has a true, and

in a sense personal quality. Those who would conceive the nature of human society should carefully note that the process of evolution leads to ever more and more complicated orders of association. Organically, simple bodies are succeeded by those which are more complex, until, in these bodies of our own, to which we are so well accustomed that they seem commonplace affairs, we have a multitude of organs, each composed of innumerable cells; and the poorest of us is a host greater than that mustered by Xerxes. This array of existences, which had to be assembled through the ages in order to constitute the human form, is marshaled and associated by our personality.

All this work of organizing the individual body, so that it may inherit from the past and transmit to the future, vast and in a way infinitely important as it is, appears to the philosophical inquirer to be a mere laying of foundations for the social edifice. This social body, in which the minds of men play a part like that of the cells in the human form, began likewise in exceeding simplicity, and is, day by day, before our eyes and in virtue of our deeds, swiftly ascending in the grades of structure. To those who attentively contemplate this majestic process of ongoing, the spectacle can be compared only to the sunrise, when each moment reveals new realms. The process is not one of growth by accretions, but rather like the swift unfolding of a structure which, like our springtime blossoms, has been shaped and stored away in other days. The social evolution is yet more peculiar in the fact that we may take a conscious part in the process; not only may we behold actions in their spontaneous march, but we may contribute to the efficiency of the work, save it from the mischances which inevitably attend the rude, wasteful, and often cruel ways of nature, giving it the finish and accomplishment which characterize human art

alone. This is the understanding to which man has been brought by our modern learning, a position more noble than our ancestors of a few generations ago could have conceived, and not yet pictured in its true nature by the noblest men of our own time.

In considering this vast spiritual body of our social system as it is taking shape before our eyes, and it may be somewhat from the labor of our hands, we readily observe that, like the earlier natural body, it has for its chief task the accumulation and transmission of inheritances. These slowly gathered transmittenda consist of very varied things. Perhaps first in order come the experiences in the conduct of life, those recognitions of moral truths which afford the subject matter of religion. Such are, by common consent, committed to that part of the organism termed the priesthood. Then we have the principles of action of man with man, which, though they may rest on the canons or rules of religion, need the interpretation and sanctions which are the keeping of jurists. Next in the hierarchy, where there is as yet no determined precedence, come the multifarious occupations of men relating to the care of the body, the production, preservation, and transmission of material resources. In a way assembling all these functions, and overarching them, is the work of the teacher.

At every step the question arises as to the means whereby the coming generation may be given possession of the accumulations of the past, and at the same time be made ready to secure its own advance. Whatever the branch of activity under consideration, this question is essentially pedagogic: it concerns the supreme art of transmitting learning. Whatever the practical application of the task may be in the crafts, the arts, or the sciences, the problem is mainly for the teacher. It is his duty to find how the learning may be gathered into a safe store, and de

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