250 SCIENCE SKETCHES. 



gator, but no investigator can afford to sacrifice 

 his specialty for the sake of breadth of culture. 

 Thoroughness is the main point, after all, and 

 should lake precedence over versatility. I do not 

 mean to be understood as advocating narrowness 

 of sympathy or narrowness of culture of any sort. 

 The broadest education is none too broad for him 

 who aspires to lead in any part of the world of 

 thought. But the forces of the mind, to continue 

 the figure, should not be scattered in guerilla-bands, 

 but marshalled toward leadership. 



4. Still another criticism of the elective system 

 is just the reverse of this. The elective system 

 permits undue scattering. It allows a student to 

 flit from one subject to another, thus acquiring 

 versatility without real training. This seems to 

 me a more serious fault than any of the others. 

 It can be remedied in part by a system of major 

 and minor studies, or a division of the work into 

 specialties to be pursued for a considerable length 

 of time, and electives which may be dropped after 

 a simple mastery of their elements. Some such 

 arrangement as this seems to me a desirable check 

 upon the elective plan, as it tends to insure per- 

 sistence in something, while retaining most of the 

 flexibility of the latter system. 



There is still much to be said in favor of the 

 college in which discipline pure and simple is made 

 the chief aim of all the work. In such a school 

 those subjects — Languages, Sciences, and Phi- 

 losophy — which serve the ends of training best 

 should be taught, and such subjects only. Whether 

 anything more suitable for this purpose than the 



