RELATIVE COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY STUDIES. As to Senator Pfeuffer's scheme for "feeding schools" for the university, to which some reference has been made, the senator, in speaking to a question of privilege in the State senate, March 31, 1885, after analyzing and defending the features of his bill, made a rather remarkable address which it would not be fairly historical to omit noticing, more particularly as an episode in the affairs of the university. In part, he said: We think we may be pardoned for holding in importance the science which teaches our youth to look to the earth and inspect its soils and discern the hidden powers of nature that, when applied, will make teeming crops and an abundant yield. We may be pardoned if we think this science equal in dignity and equally useful with the science that would consult the stars and the planets and endeavor to determine their occult influences, which, if discovered, could never be controlled. It may be discovered that spots on the sun control vegetation and the phases of the moon regulate the tides and the weather; but it is beyond the powers of man to regulate these awful influences. Metaphysical wranglers may worry their minds over innate ideas, questions of time and space, or even the calculation of the number of angels that might dance upon a needle point. The practical knowledge of one's own self, as each man may discover, and an analysis of and knowledge as it grows with us, and a knowledge of things that are natural around us, are as worthy of thought as these questions of the schoolmen. It is as important and dignified to know how to stretch and preserve the skins of cattle slaughtered with the knife, and save their meat for food, and pack it in barrels with salt, as to be able to kill the ephemeral butterfly with chloroform and preserve it with arsenic, packed away in a show case, with a Greek name in polysyllables pinned on its back doing the honors of an epitaph and biography, offered as an atonement for its poor little life, that was taken for science's sake by some murderous crazy bug hunter. There were those who thought the studies of the proper application of the pulley, the lever, the wedge, and wheel and axle to aid the powers of man's feeble muscles, and the principle of machines that assist to make work easy and redeem men, women, and children from a life of toil, were quite as important and dignified as the study of the mechanics of the solar system or as the dreams of the fanciers who imagine in their reveries that they hear the music of the spheres. But all such satire, when aimed as argument, is an assumption that applies to any institution of mere fanciful methods or imperfect means of instruction, and may therefore be, and in fact is, if applicable to either, as pertinent to the college as to the university. The senator, who was at the time president of the college board of directors, evidently ignored the fact that quite as important instruction is imparted at the university as at the college, and that the advantages afforded by the former are in the aggregate more generally useful than those of the college. Even engineering and mechanics are so thoroughly taught theoretically in the university as to leave the college no great advantage in those specialties, while the benefits of the study of agriculture as a science are exceedingly limited, and the practical work of the farmer is so much better understood by labor in the fields that very 10323-03-11 RELATIVE COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY STUDIES. As to Senator Pfeuffer's scheme for "feeding schools" for the university, to which some reference has been made, the senator, in speaking to a question of privilege in the State senate, March 31, 1885, after analyzing and defending the features of his bill, made a rather remarkable address which it would not be fairly historical to omit noticing, more particularly as an episode in the affairs of the university. In part, he said: We think we may be pardoned for holding in importance the science which teaches our youth to look to the earth and inspect its soils and discern the hidden powers of nature that, when applied, will make teeming crops and an abundant yield. We may be pardoned if we think this science equal in dignity and equally useful with the science that would consult the stars and the planets and endeavor to determine their occult influences, which, if discovered, could never be controlled. It may be discovered that spots on the sun control vegetation and the phases of the moon regulate the tides and the weather; but it is beyond the powers of man to regulate these awful influences. Metaphysical wranglers may worry their minds over innate ideas, questions of time and space, or even the calculation of the number of angels that might dance upon a needle point. The practical knowledge of one's own self, as each man may discover, and an analysis of and knowledge as it grows with us, and a knowledge of things that are natural around us, are as worthy of thought as these questions of the schoolmen. It is as important and dignified to know how to stretch and preserve the skins of cattle slaughtered with the knife, and save their meat for food, and pack it in barrels with salt, as to be able to kill the ephemeral butterfly with chloroform and preserve it with arsenic, packed away in a show case, with a Greek name in polysyllables pinned on its back doing the honors of an epitaph and biography, offered as an atonement for its poor little life, that was taken for science's sake by some murderous crazy bug hunter. There were those who thought the studies of the proper application of the pulley, the lever, the wedge, and wheel and axle to aid the powers of man's feeble muscles, and the principle of machines that assist to make work easy and redeem men, women, and children from a life of toil, were quite as important and dignified as the study of the mechanics of the solar system or as the dreams of the fanciers who imagine in their reveries that they hear the music of the spheres. But all such satire, when aimed as argument, is an assumption that applies to any institution of mere fanciful methods or imperfect means of instruction, and may therefore be, and in fact is, if applicable to either, as pertinent to the college as to the university. The senator, who was at the time president of the college board of directors, evidently ignored the fact that quite as important instruction is imparted at the university as at the college, and that the advantages afforded by the former are in the aggregate more generally useful than those of the college. Even engineering and mechanics are so thoroughly taught theoretically in the university as to leave the college no great advantage in those specialties, while the benefits of the study of agriculture as a science are exceedingly limited, and the practical work of the farmer is so much better understood by labor in the fields that very 10323-03- -11 STATE AID AN INCENTIVE TO BENEFACTIONS. The history of higher education in States whose universities are mainly supported by a university tax. and more especially the remarkable progress made by California and Michigan in promoting their State universities by such means, suggest not only the advantages of a steady income derivable from such a tax as a source for keeping the State's educational advance abreast with the rapid tide of development in population, wealth, and educational improvement and enterprise, but also the wisdom of additional State provision as an incentive to private munificence. Government action excites and prompts to individual interest and liberality in such matters, for the reason that capitalists, or the great millionaires of the country who are inclined to be public spirited in the expenditure of their surplus means for educational objects, some of them even bequeathing their entire fortunes for such purposes, preferably seek to exercise their beneficence either upon institutions already well endowed and liberally fostered by the State, so as to be well assured of their perpetuity, or in kindred monumental enterprises exclusively of their own conception, so as to be under their immediate inspiration and direction while they are living, or be largely promoted in their names after their death. And this not only because such posthumous dispositions are likely to fail of the testator's purposes, or may be especially successful as in the case of the Johns Hopkins University and some others that might be particularized, but because, as in the Cornell, Vanderbilt, Stanford, and Rockefeller cases, and prospectively Mrs. Hearst's grand enterprise in behalf of the University of California, such benefactors are certainly the best interpreters and promoters of their plans and may add to their gratuities if necessary to perfect them, to say nothing of their own personal pride and satisfaction in realizing the fruits of their beneficence, instead of being like those "Who much receive, but nothing give, Whom none can love, whom none can thank- Nor, like Franklin, Fayerweather, and McDonogh, do they leave large educational bequests to be delayed of execution, if not largely minimized by expenses of contest and liability to defeat in the courts. AN ILLUSTRIOUS EXEMPLAR. Mrs. Hearst, who is the widow of the late multimillionaire United States Senator of California, and mother of the proprietor of the New York Journal and San Francisco Examiner, and is so noted for her recent benefactions to the University of California, dispenses her charities in many ways worthy of so noble a woman, and one who is as retiring in her nature as she is enterprising in her good works. As |