362 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1903. 



Saxony. Loip.sic has 3,500 students, Columbia University about 4,000, 

 of whom, however, only about 2,000 correspond to our students. 

 These remarks are merely thrown in without any desire to compare 

 the two universities. 



There is an extraordinary ditt'erence amonj^ American universities. 

 About twelve or fifteen correspond to our twenty-one German uni- 

 versities, and even these can not be compared without hesitation, 

 because they combine with the university to a greater or lesser degree 

 some of our ""gymnasium" classes, and stand, moreover, upon quite 

 different stages of development. Almost every American university 

 has a college," which in its first two or three years corresponds some- 

 what to our "obersecunda" and "prima," and only in its last years 

 to the first year of our universities. On leaving college the student, 

 after passing an examination, receives a degree of bachelor of arts, or 

 the like, and, if he so chooses, then enters the university proper, which 

 is organized into faculties ('^schools") as among us. The individual 

 who leaves college in order to begin his life work possesses, therefore, 

 a higher education than our young men who leave the gymnasium for 

 the university. After attending the university for two years the 

 student obtains the degree of master of arts, or the like, and after one 

 or more additional years of study, the degree of doctor. The students 

 at American universities nre accordingly divided into undergraduates 

 (in the college), graduates or postgraduates (university students in the 

 more restricted sense), and special students. The latter are either 

 nongraduates or persons who, after completing their college course, 

 pursue no regular faculty studies, but inmiediately apply themselves 

 to special studies, which lie without the scholastic organization. The 

 American student is permitted to pursue special studies earlier than 

 the German student, and the students in general have a relatively free 

 choice of their lectures, as in the German universities, which is 

 also already more or less the case toward the close of the collegiate 

 course. 



A person thoroughly acquainted with German and American uni- 

 versities. Prof. H. Miinsterberg, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, once 

 declared {Der Western, Chicago, December 3, 18!;>3), with regard to 

 Harvard, that the examination for the degree of doctor of philosophy 

 as the last period of the graduate school (that is, the philosophical 

 facult}') represents a stage of scientific maturity far above the level of 

 the average German doctor; that the examination for doctor in Har- 

 vard was more like the German examination, which admits the .young 

 scholar to the office of an academical teacher ("Priv^atdocent"), than 



" Lately students have been admitted to Columbia without knowledge of the Latin 

 language, so that there the rudiments are also taught. 



