i8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ship for life, and for a pension as lecturer or tutor. Thus a man 

 is able to devote himself to research with little fear that at the 

 latter end of his career he will lack the means of suj)port. It is 

 perhaps not too much to saj that the offices of college dean, tutor, 

 and lecturer are more perquisites than anything else. They are 

 meant to keep and attract men of ability and parts. However, 

 their existence reacts upon the student body by augmenting the 

 expenses of the latter out of proportion to the benefits to be ob- 

 tained. For instance, instead of utilizing one set of lecturers for 

 one class of subjects, which all students could attend for a small 

 fee, each of the larger colleges, at any rate, pays special lecturers, 

 drawn from its own Fellows, to speak upon the same subjects each 

 to a mere handful of men from their own college only. The tutor 

 is another luxury inherited from the middle ages and therefore 

 retained, and one for which the students have to pay dearly. The 

 chief business of the tutor is not to teach, but to " look after " a 

 certain number of students who are theoretically relegated to his 

 charge. He looks up their lodgings for them, pays their bills at 

 the end of the term, gets them out of scrapes, and draws a large 

 salary. The tutorships seem to the writer to be a good illustra- 

 tion of how an office necessary to one period persists after that for 

 which it was instituted has ceased to exist. When the students 

 of Oxford and Cambridge were many of them thirteen and four- 

 teen .years of age, as in the fourteenth century, nurses were doubt- 

 less necessary, but they are still retained when the greater maturity 

 of the students renders them not only unnecessary but at times 

 even an impertinence. 



The dean is not, as with us, the head of a department; his 

 functions are not so many, his tasks far less onerous. It is before 

 a college dean that students are " hauled " for such offenses as 

 irregularity at chapel, returning to the college after 12 p. m., 

 smoking in college precincts, bringing dogs into the college grounds, 

 and other villainous offenses against regulations. A dean must 

 also attend chapel. Some colleges require two deans to struggle 

 through these complicated and laborious duties, though some pos- 

 sessing only a few dozen students succeed in getting along with one. 



The line of demarcation between the university and the col- 

 leges is very distinct. The legislative influence of the former ex- 

 tends over a coni|)aratively restricted field. All professorial chairs 

 and certain lectureships belong to and are paid by the university; 

 the latter has the arranging of the curricula, the care of the labo- 

 ratories, the disposition of certain noncollegiate scholarships; but, 

 broadly speaking, its two functions are the examination of all stu- 

 dents and the conferring of degrees. The supreme legislative body 



