6o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



sciences, like chemistry, biology and physiology, that are interwoven with 

 medical studies; and they appear to attach greater weight to this than to his 

 natural capacity or general attainments, 



one wonders where those professors of medicine are who attach greater 

 weight to rudimentary knowledge of certain sciences than to natural 

 capacitjr, and whether any one holds that that natural capacity pre- 

 cludes scientific training or conversely. 



The special training of a group or professional course is not its 

 only advantage. An expert Sanskrit scholar is better fitted to become 

 an entomologist than an amateur who has studied a little of everything. 

 Any kind of an apperceptive mass — to use the slang of psychology — is 

 better than none at all. The Columbia College faculty in requiring 

 every freshman to take six or seven studies unrelated to one another and 

 largely unrelated to his past or future work prescribes a method which 

 not one member of the faculty would be so foolish as to adopt in his 

 own work. The collective unwisdom of a college faculty is not often 

 exceeded by an undergraduate student. Nor, it may be added, is the 

 skill of a faculty in devising restrictive regulations equal to the inge- 

 nuity of the student in dodging them. As Mr. Eliot has recently said, 

 while the word " must " may be heard hereafter more frequently at 

 Cambridge, " I feel a very strong confidence in the ability of the 

 youths that come to Harvard College to take that word with apparent 

 submissiveness, but without allowing it to have any inconvenient effects 

 on the individual." 



It is doubtless true that students should not spend four years in elect- 

 ing elementary courses; it is well to persuade them and it may be de- 

 sirable to compel them to do a certain amount of consistent work in 

 some direction. The problem is largely social rather than educational; 

 it is not serious in the colleges of the great state universities. They 

 have all sorts of programs and curriculums; but as a rule the student 

 does his work because it is of concern to him. He has a major sub- 

 ject; he has already begun, or will take up in a year or two, agricul- 

 ture, medicine, engineering or some other life work, and in the mean- 

 while he is preparing for it. The air of the place is saturated with 

 honest work. If these young men and women are crude, it is because 

 their homes are but a generation from the frontier, not because their 

 work in college is real. They not only learn more, but make more 

 progress in polite manners and broadening interests than do the boys 

 in the colleges of the Atlantic seaboard. 



Before the section of education of the American Association for 

 the Advancement of Science a year ago, addresses were made by Pro- 

 fessor Boyce and Professor Tufts on " The American College and 

 Life," which emphasized the need of giving reality to the work of col- 

 lege students by breaking clown the artificial barriers between culture 



