jz THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



rank with, the German universities. We are handicapped by the 

 college tradition of four years' education to fit a man for every- 

 thing in general and nothing in particular. But the colleges are 

 rapidly losing ground, and it seems to be only a question of time 

 as to their total disappearance. I do not mean that they will 

 cease to exist in name, but that a college (in the sense of the term 

 as universally accepted thirty years ago) is an institution which 

 will have no place in the American educational system of the 

 future, just as it is unknown in the present educational system of 

 Europe. In fact, our best colleges are passing through rapid revo- 

 lutionary changes, and, like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and others, 

 are becoming universities. Let it be our part to help the trans- 

 formation, to hasten it, and to secure for research its place as the 

 basis of the highest education in science. Every one admits that- 

 the value of a university depends chiefly upon its professors, but 

 it is not understood that ability to give instruction six to ten 

 hours a week successfully by no means qualifies a man to be a 

 university professor. The essential qualifications for a professor 

 of any natural science are, first, ability to carry on original re- 

 search ; second, ability to train others to carry on original re- 

 search. AH other qualifications are subsidiary. Of university 

 life research is the Alpha and research is the Omega. 



We welcome the growth of the university idea in this country, 

 and we can not gather in this place without speaking with grate- 

 ful recognition of the services rendered to the cause of the high- 

 est education by the university whose guests we are to-day. The 

 Johns Hopkins University has the glory of having been the first 

 American institution to accept unreservedly the genuine univer- 

 sity ideal. Would that she had had more imitators ! 



Summing up the conclusions announced by Mr. Worthington 0. Smith in his 

 book, Man, the Primeval Savage, Dr. W. Boyd Dawkins agrees with the author 

 in the opinion that man inhabited southeastern England after the Glacial period ; 

 also in the view that the preglacial or postglacial age of man is to be regarded 

 as merely of local significance, because the Glacial period is a purely local phe- 

 nomenon, not marked in the warmer southern lands, such as the Indian Peninsula, 

 which was inhabited by the palaeolithic hunter. " We know him in India simply as 

 living in the Pleistocene age. He probably invaded Europe in the preglacial age, 

 and lived in the south while Britain lay buried under a mass of glaciers, or was 

 covered by a berg-laden sea. He is postglacial in the valley of the Thames. He 

 is not separated from our own times either by a wall of ice the ice age of Prof. 

 James Geikie or by the tumultuous waters of a vast deluge, such as that recently 

 put before us by Sir Henry Oovvorth. He is separated by a geographical revolu- 

 tion during which the seaboard of northwestern Europe, as we find it now, came 

 into being, and Britain became an island as well as by a change in our land 

 from a continental to an insular climate." 



