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the methods to be pursued in the undergraduate part of preparatory 

 training. 



Without dispute broad general culture is the point and the essential 

 requirement. 



The deep foundations must be of stone, whatever is to be the super- 

 structure. 



My earnest plea is for more room in the elementary period for training 

 in the branches which are extra, or rather pre-professional, and which 

 must be mastered before any one can lay claim to a liberal education. 



If we were permitted to interpret Shakespeare's seven stages of life, his 

 third would conclude with the undergraduate course, while the fourth, 

 who enters as the " lover sighing like furnace with a woful ballad made 

 to his mistress' eyebrow,'' would mean that devotion to professional study 

 which is more than that of the lover and an attention more exacting than 

 that of the most jealous mistress. 



In the preparation for professional life no exclusiveness can be too ex- 

 elusive, no labor or painstaking within the severest limits can be too ex- 

 acting. 



All that the most ardent advocate for specialties is accepted, and if pre- 

 sented to our great congress of thinkers would be unanimously adopted. 



This is the time in life when the student should be lost to the world, 

 . when the claims of social life may be ignored, when culture even may be 

 suspended in the eager search for facts. 



If the chosen profession be science, the laboratory should be alike shop 

 and parlor; if literature, to quote again from the Editor's Study, books 

 only, " those unfailing faithful companions which stand mute and waiting 

 on the shelves, in whose hearts are preserved the thought, the aspiration, 

 the despair, the love, the heroism, the emotion, the tragedy, the immor- 

 tal beauty, the bewitching loveliness of the ages.'' 



So oblivious to outer things should be the professional student, that a 

 casual glance at the daily newspaper could scarcely be allowed to keep 

 him informed whether or not he himself has not died. 



The usual commencement benediction welcomes the graduate to the 

 great world of letters, but this welcome should be to the retirement and 

 not to the activities of this realm of thought, and the interpretation should 

 be that he has studied to be somebody, now let him learn to do some- 

 thing. A Paul even found it necessary to retire three years into Arabia 



