Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[173] elective courses in Greek alone; and in all undergraduate branches not less than two hundred and thirty—each course offering occupation enough for a whole term's study, and some of them for that of a whole life. The ‘option which of two’ described by Emerson as the painful necessity of later years, is here initiated in the earliest; and it is even proposed to carry it yet further into the preparatory schools by the alternative standards of admission. Even in Greek a single mood or tense of the verb is held to furnish material for a treatise; and so of every division and sub-division of all knowledge. Baron Osten Sacken, the entomologist, who during his stay in this country was our highest authority on the Diptera, or two-winged insects, always maintained that he had erred in marking out a range of study too vast for any single intellect; and that he should have done better to confine himself to some one family, as for instance, the Culicidoe, or gnats. There was nothing extreme in this confession; it might be paralleled in every department of study. But meanwhile what becomes of, ‘the authors’?

I am not now speaking with any special