3IO POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and on the course of study. There is no magic in the name of college, 

 and there is no gain in wrong subjects, work shirked, or in right sub- 

 jects taken under wrong teachers. Studies, like other food, must be 

 assimilated before they can help the system. 



The great indictment of the college is its waste of the student's 

 time; prescribed studies taken unwillingly; irrelevant studies taken 

 to fill up, helpful studies taken under poor teachers, any kind of studies 

 taken idly — all these have tended to discredit the college course. Four 

 years is all too short for a liberal education, if every moment be 

 utilized. Two years is all too long if they are spent in idleness and 

 dissipation, or if tainted by the spirit of indifference. 



The spirit of the college is more important than the time it takes. 

 The college atmosphere should be a clean and wholesome one, full of 

 impulses to action. It is good to breathe this air, and in doing so, it 

 matters little whether one's studies be wholly professional, half pro- 

 fessional, or directed towards ends of culture alone. 



The practical evolution of this matter will be this: The medical 

 school for the exceptional student will require a college course of 

 science with physiology and chemistry as the leading subjects, other 

 sciences, with German and French, being necessary factors. The state 

 medical colleges and those of similar purposes will content themselves 

 with a minimum of two years of college work, along semi-professional 

 lines, the preparatory medical course. 



In city colleges where the students live at home, traveling back 

 and forth on street cars, a college atmosphere can not be developed. 

 In these institutions, as a rule, the college work is perfunctory, its 

 recitations being often regarded as a disagreeable interruption of 

 social and athletic affairs. As a rule, higher education begins when 

 a man leaves home to become part of a guild of scholars. The city 

 college is merely a continued high school, and with both students and 

 teachers there is a willingness to cut it as short as possible, so that the 

 young men can 'get down to business.' In institutions of this type, the 

 professional school forms a sharp contrast to the college in its stronger 

 requirements and more serious purpose. In other types of college, it is 

 the general student who does the best work. In many of them the 

 professional departments are far inferior in tone and spirit to the 

 general academic course. 



It becomes, then, a question of the college itself, how long a student 

 should stay in it. If the academic requirements are severe, just and 

 honest, if the idler, the butterfly, the blockhead and the parasite are 

 promptly dropped from the rolls, if the spirit of plain living and 

 high thinlcing rules in the college, the student should stay there as 

 long as he can, and if possible take part of his professional work under 



