I also desire that you should be a man of scholarly sympathy and appreciation. I can hardly hope you will be a scholar. Yet you may. The scholar seldom emerges. If one out of each thousand students, entering the American college this year, should prove to be a scholar, the proportion is as large as one can hope for. For up to one in a thousand is as big a proportion as the world is prepared to accept. Yet it is to be hoped that you and that most men should have appreciation and sympathy with scholarship. You should know what scholarship means: in work as toilsomeness, in method as wisdom, in atmosphere as thoroughness and patience, in result as an addition to the stock of human knowledge. If you be a laborer in one field, you should not seek, and I know you will not seek, to discount the existence of other fields, or despise the laborers in those fields. If you become an engineer, you will not condemn the classicist as useless. If you are a Grecian, you will not despise the mechanical engineer as crass and coarse.
One finds that the best men of any one field or calling are more inclined to recognize the eminence of the claims of other fields or callings. Smallness spells provincialism, and provincialism spells smallness. I have heard one of the greatest teachers of chemistry say that if he were to make a boy a professor of chemistry, he would, among other things, first teach him Greek.