POST-GRADUATE DEGREES IN ABSENTIA. 259- 



at thirty-five. A critical study of most others will demonstrate 

 that, while the recognition of their labors may have been deferred by 

 circumstances mainly lack of opportunity till later in life, they 

 were actively engaged in their life work by the twenty-fifth year and 

 had laid the foundation of success by the thirtieth. The late Dr. 

 William Pepper, though one of the most earnest advocates of a liberal 

 education for medical men as well as of thorough medical training, 

 declared at the time of his ripest experience that any educational 

 system was a mistake which would not allow the average man to enter 

 upon actual practice at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four. It 

 would prolong this paper unduly to quote his arguments, none of which 

 however, was so convincing as his own life-history. Business men 

 would, probably, assign a still earlier age. Among educators and scien- 

 tists, there exists a considerable diversity of opinion; probably the 

 majority would favor a lengthening of the period of preparation but 

 it is questionable whether their personal biographies would support 

 this opinion. On the whole, it would seem that the preparatory period 

 should not occupy more than a third of the maximum duration of 

 active life and that it should not extend much beyond the period of 

 physiologic growth. 



As a matter of abstract fairness, it may be argued that the ad- 

 vanced degrees are, at present, open to all college graduates on equal 

 terms let them accept or reject these terms as they please; if the 

 A.M. or Ph.D. is not worth the sacrifice of a year or two of active life, 

 why complain because one cannot eat his cake and have it too? But 

 is this a wise attitude to assume? Granted that the privileges of the 

 master or doctor and the esteem in which he is held by the community 

 in no practical way exceed those enjoyed by the bachelor, long custom 

 has established the post-graduate degrees, and they should stand for 

 the best, ripest, most practical and wisest scholarship of the times. 

 When the immature critic and student of other men's writings is 

 eligible to a title that is denied to the man who creates literature 

 that is deemed worthy of serious consideration, even though not of 

 epoch-making value; when the laboratory worker who follows the 

 lines laid down by others receives a tangible reward from which the 

 pioneers of such study are often excluded; when field-work in science 

 must radiate from a college rather than from a center which offers 

 equal or greater scientific opportunities; when one museum or library 

 yields not only information but a scholastic degree, while another, as 

 good or better but not incorporated as part of a university, receives 

 no such recognition; when second-hand knowledge of old-world 

 linguistics and anthropology is placed on a higher level than original 

 research, carried on independently, and dealing with similar problems 



