"
To effect this, no doubt, "industry must be our oracle, and reason our
Apollo," as Sir T. Browne says; but surely it is no unreasonable estimate;
yet how far do we fall short of it? General culture is often deprecated
because it is said that smatterings are useless. But there is all the
difference in the world between having a smattering of, or being well
grounded in, a subject. It is the latter which we advocate--to try to
know, as Lord Brougham well said, "everything of something, and something
of everything."
"It can hardly," says Sir John Herschel, "be pressed forcibly enough on
the attention of the student of nature, that there is scarcely any natural
phenomenon which can be fully and completely explained, in all its
circumstances, without a union of several, perhaps of all, the sciences."
The present system in most of our public schools and colleges sacrifices
everything else to classics and arithmetic. They are most important
subjects, but ought not to exclude science and modern languages.
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