Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/202

174 HARVARD LAW REVIEW any reason, propose to master these subjects, to make true and exact statements of them, and to carry forward in these regions the limits of human knowledge ; and especially the teachers of these things. Second, not in so great a degree, but each as far as he may, the leaders in the practical application of these branches of knowledge to human affairs. Third, in a still less degree, yet in some degree, all practitioners of these subjects, if I may use that phrase, who wish to understand their business and to do it thoroughly well. Precisely the same thing is true in law as in these or any other of the great parts of human knowledge. In all it is alike bene- ficial, and alike necessary for the vigorous and fruitful development of the subject, for the best performance of the every-day work of the calling to which they relate, and for the best carrying out of the plain practical duties of each man's place, that somewhere and by some persons these subjects should be investigated with the deepest research and the most searching critical study. The time has gone by when it was necessary to vindicate the utility of deep and lifelong investigations into the nature of elec- tricity and the mode of its operation, into the nature of light and heat and sound and the laws that govern their action, into the mi- nute niceties of the chemical and physiological laboratory, the speculations and experiments of geology, or the absorbing calcula- tions of the mathematician and the astronomer. Men do not now need to be told what it is that has given them the steam-engine, the telegraph, the telephone, the electric railway and the electric light, the telescope, the improved lighthouse, the lucifer match, antiseptic surgery, the prophylactics against small-pox and diph- theria, aluminum the new metal, and the triumphs of modern engineering. These things are mainly the outcome of what seemed to a majority of mankind useless and unpractical study and experiment. But as regards our law, those who press the importance of thor- ough and scientific study are not yet exempt from the duty of pointing out the use of it and its necessity. To say nothing of the widespread scepticism among a certain class of practical men, in and out of our profession, as to the advantages of anything of the sort, there is also, among many of those who nominally admit it and even advocate it, a remarkable failure to appreciate what this admission means. It is the simple truth that you cannot have thorough and first-rate training in law, any more than in