courages cannot fail to become a habit which shall show itself in purely literary work. For an example, the destruction of the theory of special creation must affect literature by requiring that writers should shun incoherence, and should look upon the mere accumulation of psychological impossibilities, however impressive, as no better than the introduction of a ghost into a sleeping-car.

Certain lovers of letters are alarmed at the advance of science and seem to fear that, unless extraordinary precautions are taken, the imagination will expire like the Ptolemaic system of astronomy. Mr. Matthew Arnold takes up the cause of literature with some warmth in a recent number of an English magazine, and it is certainly an interesting sign of the times that we find belles-lettres on the defensive. It is a very ingenious defense that Mr. Arnold makes. His ridicule is effective, as ridicule generally is when used against new notions, and it is easy to imagine the smile that must have lit up the faces of his audience-for the article consists of a lecturewhen, more than once, he mentioned the "hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits."

Still, it is possible to conceive of a time when the division between literature and science shall be less sharply drawn than it is at present. Now they are looked upon as two hostile camps, and skirmishing is warm at the outposts. Yet there may be peace in the future when the man of letters shall cease to amuse himself and others with picturing the man of science as an arrogant person whose sole occupation is pouring some unsavory decoction from one glass tube into another, and when the scientific man shall no more imagine the man of letters to be a somewhat contemptuous person who prefers alliterations to more solid good. After all, what surprises people who have ceased to quarrel is the extent to which they agree, and when we consider that every one of us is the product of both scientific and literary training, we are conscious of no vast dissensions within ourselves. Possibly society may tolerate both literature and science.

The point now discussed is the prominence to be given to science in education, and Mr. Arnold derides those who maintain that the students who choose literature and history, do less well than those who study science. He illustrates the folly of his opponents by mentioning a member of Parliament who wrote a book about this country, which contained a good deal of valu

able information about geology, and closed with the suggestion that we import an English prince and establish a constitutional monarchy. "Surely, in this case, the president of the section for Mechanical Science would himself hardly say that our member of Parliament, by concentrating himself upon geology and mining and so on, and not attending to literature and history, had 'chosen the more useful alternative.'" The question can hardly be regarded as settled by this error of a scientific observer. Students of literature and history have been known to make quite as gross mistakes as this one of the unliterary member of Parliament. It is scarcely ingenuous to father on science blunders that are as old as history, and which might easily be met by the tu quoque argument. How exact is Mr. Arnold's article on America?

When the classical system of education was established, about four hundred years ago, it covered the whole field of the learning of the time. It survives now, when nearly every other institution of that time has yielded to the growth of the modern spirit. Ecclesiasticism has bowed to the change; government has thrown half of its power to the governed; the faint glimmerings of science in those days are lost from sight in the splendor of what the world now knows by that name; and yet herds of schoolboys are filled with a distaste for letters because the languages of Greece and Rome are still employed as counters for the acquisition of prizes.

There are two things which tend to correct the narrowness of an exclusively classical education. One is the fact that worldly success requires a wider preparation than was demanded four centuries ago. Society, in this country at least, is learning to look upon devotion to the classics as a luxury, not as a necessity, and the colleges are meeting this new opposition, enlarging their curriculum. The classics are no longer the key to all knowledge, and it is idle of us to pretend that we think that they are. Secondly, and apart from this material reason, the recent growth of science which, through a thousand channels, is modifying the thought of society on every subject, demands a place in modern education. Certainly, colleges should be the leaders of thought if they wish to retain the influence they once had. It is not to be desired that students who have received what, by common consent, is called the best education of their time, should not be equipped for the position they are expected to take in the world. We do not wish our colleges to be vats of an

tiquated opinion, in which students shall soak for four years and come out to find themselves compelled to unlearn faulty methods, to avoid being defenders of an obsolete past.

To say nothing of what the theory of evolution has done for the natural sciences, it has made over the history of human actions and of every form of human thought. It has shown us in what way literature, for example, grows in accordance with perceptible laws; it enables us to get a better vision of antiquity; it is, in short, like every great step in thought, a simplification of knowledge, and, like every great step in thought, it is met by sniffs and sneers.

The raw fact that a burning wax candle is converted into carbonic acid and water is but a scrap of education, or rather of information; but the comprehension of the processes of evolution, be it in language, history, or butterflies, gives one a key which he can apply with advantage to any accumulation of learning. After all, the great aim of teaching is not what to think, but how to think, and if this is best learned in a laboratory let us send boys into the laboratory.

That science will expel literature is no more likely than that geometrical diagrams will take the place of pictures. Art and literature may languish, but they will be most certain to do this when they turn their back on the great interests of society. Science must influence them, but it will be by purging them of the melodramatic element, which can certainly be well spared. There is no danger that we shall lose our admiration of masterpieces. We are no less moved by the apparition of Hamlet's father because we know that ghosts do not appear. All that I mean is this-that such work of ours as is done in the way we ourselves think natural and right, is more likely to live than such as we do because some one else has approved of it. Despair over the probable ruin of art and letters because science is powerful, is a superfluous abandonment of hope when we look upon the magnificence of modern literature that grew up an imitation of the Roman imitation of Greek writers.

If science gives us the truth about anything, there is more hope for letters than if these concern themselves only with musty conventionalities. Science enlarges the sphere of our observation and renders this more exact. In this way it feeds and does not blight the imagination.

THOMAS SERGEANT PERRY.

SANITARY DRAINAGE.

SANITARY drainage, as we know it in America, has been a peculiarly progressive art. Forty years ago, towns were sewered to get rid of their surface and subsoil waters,―mainly to prevent the flooding or dampness of cellars, and the obstruction of traffic by the accumulations of storm-water. Agricultural lands were drained for agricultural improvement. Houses were drained for convenience. "Sanitary," so far as common speech was concerned, was a word uncoined. Edwin Chadwick, then a middle-aged enthusiast, had barely inaugurated the movement which the world was so slow to take up, which has owed so much of its progress to his sturdy and sustained impulse, and of which, as a hale octogenarian, he is still one of the most lucid, most enterprising, and most effective promoters.

Though till then carried on with little reference to the health of the person or of the people, the drainage of houses and grounds and towns had become a somewhat systematic art. The stormsewers of the first half of the century constituted the basis of the sanitary drainage which was to follow. The covered creeks and the subterranean waterways of London and other cities, constructed with a widely different purpose, were used for the discharge of a gradually increasing proportion of the offscourings of the population. Following Chadwick's suggestion, the subject of separating this foul flow from the storm-water drainage, after much discussion, obtained a certain amount of practical development. It had elicited much instructive discussion, and not a little acrimonious debate, at the time when the improvement of town sewerage began to receive intelligent attention in America. The first important contribution to this branch of our municipal literature was made by Mr. Chesbrough, who, in 1858, reported to the local authorities of Chicago the results of a careful and critical study of European drainage systems, offering at the same time

a sewerage project for the apparently impracticable swamp area which had been chosen for the site of that city,- a scheme which, for the time when it was projected and the conditions by which it was limited, was a more than notable example of successful and intelligent engineering skill. The same talent applied now to the same conditions, in the light of what has since been learned, would produce a different and better plan, but hardly one so much in advance of the examples in which it originated.

The sewerage of Chicago and Mr. Chesbrough's later work at New Haven and elsewhere, have had a controlling influence on the sewerage systems of the country. Among the best examples of similar work executed by other engineers, may be cited the sewerage of Providence, of Brooklyn, and of the upper part of New York. But, after all, a review of the drainage works of all the cities of the country shows, on the whole, how limited has been the influence of any sanitary suggestion. The drainage systems of our newer towns is generally bad, and those of the older ones is even worse. Taken as a whole, the old peninsula of Boston is a quite complete museum of almost every conceivable mistake and defect in public sewerage. It has some good sewers, but an unusual proportion of very bad ones, as is shown by an illustrated report on the subject made by Eliot C. Clarke, Esq., to the Massachusetts State Board of Health. Philadelphia offers in its older and its best peopled portions much less variety of defect, but an almost universal dissemination of defects of very serious character.

Boston, Buffalo, and a few other large towns are now executing or considering the construction of great intercepting trunksewers to keep their foul outflow out of adjacent waters. It would have been more logical if the authorities of those cities had first secured the reconstruction of their interior sewerage systems, and so remedied faults which have a more immediate effect on the health of the people. Certainly, a logical sequence of their present efforts must be an extension to the interior of the town of the principle of purification now being applied to the water front. The influence of the example of England, where the greatest attention has been given to water-carried sewerage, has been most important. The practice of separating storm-water from foul drainage, advocated there some forty years ago, and from that time to this largely adopted, was so obviously a move in the right direction, where circumstances