18 KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
active duties. He is then twenty-eight years of age, and two or three years more 
will certainly be needed before he becomes an independent member of society. 
And this is not the worst of it. In the profession of medicine, as in all other 
professions, book lore, or professional lore, is only a part of the foundation 
for successful practice. A knowledge of mankind, of men and women, is more 
essential than a finished knowledge of his profession. At twenty-seven or twenty- 
eight a man is too old to acquire this knowledge in the best way; the plasticity 
of youth is waning, and new habits are hard to form. He must remain more or 
less controlled by his student habits, out of intimate touch with the great mass 
of the people and their inner life. And this lack of knowledge of human nature 
must surely remain as an obstacle to the most useful and successful practice. 
’ President Eliot has said: ‘‘The average age of admission to Harvard College 
at this moment is fully nineteen. The student who stays here four years is 
twenty-three years old when he graduates. He then goes to our medical school 
to stay four years; so he is twenty-seven years of age before he has his medical 
degree, and we all know that some years intervene between that achievement and 
the competency to support a family. Now, that highly educated young man 
ought to have married at twenty-five.” ’ 
The same conditions will surely confront the lawyer before long, and not only 
the lawyer, but the dentist, the theologian, and students of other learned profes- 
sions. 
An answer that is brought as a solution for this unsatisfactory state of affairs 
is that the fault,is in the preparatory schools. That poor teachers and poor 
teaching make the work of preparation for the college longer than need be, is 
very true, but I do not think that any relief obtained here will influence students 
toward the college of liberal arts. As teaching in the secondary schools becomes 
better and more efficient, other subjects will be crowded into the high-school 
course, filling in all the time that is saved. This will be of added advantage to 
the professional student, and will more and more tend to lead him away from the 
college of liberal arts. Furthermore, none of the colleges of the United States 
have shown much, if any, tendency to shorten the course leading to, or render 
less difficult the requirements for, the bachelor of arts degree. 
The entrance requirements for the medical and law schools are at the present 
time very unsatisfactory. The medical schools have labored unceasingly to in- 
crease them for the medical degree, during the past ten years, so far as profes- 
sional knowledge is concerned, but they have done very little toward increasing 
the requirements for admission to the schools. In very few schools are they at 
all equivalent to those for admission to the freshman class in the better colleges 
of liberal arts. A very little knowledge of some foreign language, usually Latin 
is required; a little mathematics and a little physics, and a passable knowledge 
of English; but the student needs very little of what the world calls liberal cul- 
ture, and practically nothing whatever is demanded. 
After considering these chaotic entrance conditions to the professional colleges 
of law and medicine, it is refreshing to turn to another, in which, with but little 
pretension, with modesty and deprecation, rather a model has been set which all 
the other professions will, in the end, surely follow. 
The engineering profession to-day is, upon the whole, the best educated in 
America. While there may be a smaller proportion of highly trained men, there 
is also a far smaller proportion of poorly trained ones than in either medicine or 
law. It may seem strange that that profession which comes less into immediate 
contact with the general public should be, upon the whole, more highly trained 
than those which touch so closely the pecuniary and physical well-being of every 
