24 KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
sciences is deemed as valuable in his preparatory training as is language or 
mathematics, and there will be no lack of good teachers. 
Were I, then, to say what the universities and colleges ought to do, it veheale 
be this: Make all the ancient language requirements for admission optional, and 
demand as much preparation in the physical and biological sciences as in the 
foreign languages. The preparation in English should be made far more rigorous 
and thorough. In the college course, if anything besides English is required, 
and I think there should be, I would have the natural sciences as necessary a part 
of the education as language and mathematics. I would not have it possible for 
a student to graduate from the college without having studied, and thoroughly 
studied, mathematics as far as trigonometry, at least one foreign language, and 
at least one physical and one biological science. And I donot mean a few weeks 
of study in any of these branches, but exhaustive, careful, critical study. 
The methods of study in all these branches are diverse and are absolutely 
essential for symmetrical mind-building. 
Furthermore, an indefinite, haphazard selection of studies in the college 
course should be impossible. The course should be, so far as possible, adapted 
to the capacities, tastes and abilities of the individual, and this does not mean 
an indiscriminate selection on the part of the student. A person with feebly 
developed chest muscles might naturally prefer those physical exercises in which 
such muscles would take little part, but he nevertheless needs such exercise 
most. 
It is through the great universities, and especially the state universities, that 
the solution of the problems of professional education must come, and, in fact, 
has come, for some of the professions. With such cultural training as is best 
adapted to the lawyer’s needs, the college course should include all the strictly 
non-professional branches, leaving the student, after he has completed his course 
as bachelor of arts in law, to take up the work of the professional school and 
complete it in two years with the degree of doctor of laws. In the medical course 
there are even greater opportunities than in Jaw. The medical colleges should 
resign to the undergraduate arts course all the non-professional branches. And 
the work rightfully belongs there. The best chemical laboratories in the United 
States are not in the medical colleges, but in the universities. Nowhere are 
physiology, histology and anatomy better taught than outside of medical colleges. 
As in engineering, there should be an harmonious course leading through the 
high school to the bachelor of arts in medicine, preparatory to two years of 
strictly professiona] work, with the degree of doctor of medicine. 
When such training as this is demanded of all aspirants to professional prac- 
tice we shall have uniformly well-educated men in the professions, and not until 
then. 
THE KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
BY ITS PRESIDENT, D. E. LANTZ, CHAPMAN, KAN. 
An address delivered December 30, 1898, before the thirty-first annual meeting of the Kansas 
Academy of Science. 
The present session is the thirty-first annual meeting of the Kansas Academy 
of Science. An institution which has existed for thirty years in the state of 
Kansas ought to have done work which should fully justify its existence. It 
should have already so impressed itself upon the public as to merit the continued 
favor, not only of scientific circles, but of the whole commonwealth. ; 
The Kansas Academy of Science has done al] its work in the past with be- 
coming modesty. Its meetings have been held without preliminary parade or 
