It can not be denied, that for many years, radicals have inveighed against ‘Greek and Universities,’ but it has been in a narrow, vulgar, and simply destructive manner, with no provision to substitute any thing better in their place.  The growth of science, of the knowledge of history, of culture in every branch, has, however, of late, so vastly increased, that the proposition to reform the old system of study is really one not to tear it down, but to build it up, to extend it and develop it on a grand scale.  Since, for example, the influence of science has been felt in philology, how inconsiderable do the Bruncks and Porsons of the old school, appear before the Bopps, Schlegels, Burnoufs, and Muellers of the new!  For as yet, even where here and there in colleges a liberal and enlightened method is partially attempted, still the old monkish spirit appears, driving away with something like a ‘mystery’ or ‘guild’ feeling the merely practical man, and interposing a mass of ‘dead vocables,’ which must be learned by years of labor, between him and the realization of an education.  The young man who is to be a miner, a cotton-spinner, an architect, or a merchant, may possibly find here and there, at this or that college, lectures and instruction which may aid him directly in his future career, but he soon realizes that the general tendency and tone of the college is entirely in favor of abstract studies quite useless out in the world, and apart from preparation for one of ‘the three professions.’  He himself is as a ‘marine’ among the regular sailors, a surgeon among ‘regular doctors,’ or as a dentist among surgeons.  And this in an age when we may say that what is not to be studied scientifically is not worth studying.  As our principal object in writing these remarks has been to assert that the Polytechnic Institute, in its either partial or entire form, should exist entirely independent of all other influences, we might be held excused from any mention of such scientific schools as are attached to our Universities.  That of Cambridge, Massachusetts, would, however, deserve special mention, from the celebrity of its teachers.  In this institute, which has between seventy and eighty students, we have a single school divided into the following departments:  that of Chemistry, under supervision of Professor Horseford, in which instruction is both theoretical and practical; that of Zooelogy and Geology, in which the teaching consists alternately of a course of lectures by Professor Agassiz, on Zoology, embracing the fundamental principles of the classification of animals as founded upon structure and embryonic development, and illustrating their natural affinities, habits, distribution, and the relations which exist between the living and extinct races, and a course of geology, both theoretical and practical.  To this are added the departments of Engineering under Professor Eustis, that of Botany, under Professor Gray, that of Comparative Anatomy and