33 2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



else must depend. In the long run, the greatest university will be the 

 one that devotes the most care to its undergraduates. With the college 

 graduation higher education in England mostly stops. With Ger- 

 many here the higher education begins. Higher education has been 

 denned as that training which demands that a man should leave home. 

 It means a breaking of the leading strings. It means the entrance to 

 another atmosphere. The high school and the gymnasium cannot have 

 the academic atmosphere, however advanced their studies may be. 

 They must reflect the spirit of the town which supports them and of 

 which they are necessarily a part. They cannot be free in the sense 

 in which the universities are free. A boy who lives at home in a city 

 and goes back and forth on a train cannot be a university student. He 

 may recite in the university classes, but there his work ends. He gets 

 little of the spirit which moves outside of the class room. He cannot 

 enter the university until he breathes the university atmosphere. The 

 f Spurstudenten' or ' rail way students/ those who come and go on the 

 trains, are rightly held by their fellows in Germany to be little more 

 than Philistines. Whatever the other excellencies of the German sys- 

 tem, the gymnasium, or advanced high school, is an inadequate sub- 

 stitute for the American college. 



The second function of the university is that of professional train- 

 ing. To the man once in the path of culture this school adds effective- 

 ness in his chosen calling. This work the American universities have 

 taken up slowly and grudgingly. The demand for instruction in law 

 and medicine has been met weakly but extensively by private enter- 

 prise. The schools thus founded have been dependent on the students' 

 fees, and on the advertising gain their teachers receive through con- 

 nection with them. Such schools as these stand no comparison with 

 the professional schools of Germany. Their foundation is precarious, 

 they can not demand high standards, nor look beyond present necessi- 

 ties to the future of professional training. Only a few of these schools 

 to-day demand high standards. Those who do not can not share 

 the university spirit. They have no part in university development. 

 Only in the degree that they are part and parcel of the university do 

 they in general deserve to live. The first profession to become thus 

 allied is that of engineering, thanks to the wisdom that directed the 

 Morrill Act. Following this, law, medicine, theology, education in 

 some quarters, have taken a university basis, and the few professional 

 schools in which such a basis exists rank fairly with the best of their 

 class in the world. 



The crowning function of a university is that of original research. 

 On this rests the advance of civilization. From the application of 

 scientific knowledge most of the successes of the nineteenth century 

 have arisen. It is the first era of science. Behind the application of 



