THE UNIVERSITY.

Evening Star, Volume IX, Issue 2630, 22 July 1871, Page 2

THE UNIVERSITY.

ADMISSION OF FEMALE STUDENTS, WITH SOME OF ITS PROBABLE RESULTS.

' Commenting upon the few remarks made by Professor Sale upon the above subject, on the occasion of the inauguration of the University, the Hawke's Bay Herald remarks :—lf the proposal to admit female students should not bo adopted by the Council, in the meantime, we shall be justified in regarding its adoption merely as having been deferred, and, probably, for a very short period, not as having beon finally rejected. Some time since the Sydney University was opened to ladies, and the most influential section of the Victorian press is strongly urging a similar course on the oen.ite of ttieir local institution. Not only, however, have colonial, and, of course, American, Universities recognised the necessity of keeping pace withtheadvaucement of the age in the matter, but it is now the case that some of the home Universities, among them Edinburgh, have done the same. At Home the appliances for education outside Universities are much more abundant than they are here. Hence, whatever arguments ay be urged in favor of the innovation there may be urged with double force here j and when we find -that these arguments have been of sufficient weight to overcome the prepossessions of Englishmen and Scotchmen, the probability is very great, indeed, that they will prove strong enough to overcome the weaker prepossessions of colonists. An indirect result of allowing women to participate in the description of education hitherto confined to men will, no doubt, be, in time, to modify it considerably. It is already, pretty generally recognised that the sooner Greek, as a part of ordinary liberal study, is given up the better. No doubt the finest models of literary style are to be found in that language ; but then who finds them ? Perhaps one in a hundred thousand of those who study it. Ninety per cent, of them do not carry it far enough to be able to read it with the ease and fluency necessary to appreciate the subtle beauties of its literature ; and of the remaining ten per cent., nine, probably, are scholars of the dry-as dust species, and, consequently, not capable of receiving a high degree of - literary culture from any source. As for the information contained in the books written in the language, it can he convoyed quite as well by means of translations as by the study of tho original, and a good deal of the culture can be conveyed by the same channel. Keats, whose mind was perhaps more thoroughly imbued with.the spirit of the classics than any other modern poet, and who has reproduced the conceptions of the ancient mythology with a perfection unequalled at least iu England, did not know a syllable of the language, ahd drew all his knowledge of its literature from translations. It is, desirable, therefore, that a study, the uses of which are so extremely visionary, should have something more practical and rational substituted for it. But if it seems absurd to be filling the hi-ads of our youth with barren and meaningless grammatical rules and inflexions, which is what the teaching of Greek virtually amounts to, it must seem doubly absurd to subject ladies, who have hitherto been spared the infliction, to the same process. .It they ure admitted to tho classes of the University their educational requirements must, no doubt, in tune be taken more or less into account, and the course of study modified accordingly. Nothing but good, we conceive, can result 1 from the modification,