42 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
children are addressed in this demand. Do they lack what is 
wanted ? If so, they will assuredly give place to those who have 
it, in the new shaping of affairs: for to the school we are turn- 
ing with increasingly intelligent insistance that it shall nourish 
and stimulate interest, afford adequate discipline for the per- 
formance of subsequent tasks, and pass the child on with so 
large a stock as may be of useful information. 
Ability to meet this requirement in the schools is echoed 
up successively from kindergarten to grammar school, to 
secondary school, to college, and to university; and the ten- 
dency is growing to demand that a teacher in any class shall 
have benefited from a more advanced field than that in which 
he is to practice. To the colleges fall the opportunity and duty 
of building onto the foundation of the school a superstructure 
of ambition, and of correlation and application of a broadened 
and deepened knowledge. To me the task of a university 
seems to be to equip this superstructure with a love of produc- 
tive scholarship, practice in its methods, and a wisdom that 
differs in kind as well as in degree from the information and 
knowledge of school and college. And beyond the university 
with set requirements for winning its academic approval, lies 
life: life without set requirement and of unbounded oppor- 
tunity, or life with its possibilities cramped by need of win- 
ning the staff on which it rests. 
If doctors or masters go from the university without being 
capable teachers or public servants or investigators, who is to 
blame? Some say that the blame lies with these men who 
come with sufficient preparation for no adequate plan for 
the life for which they are supposed to be getting the last 
help that others can give them, and in whom the interest of 
childhood has never been warmed into the ambition of ado- 
lescence. Those who say this, see a remedy in quick and 
complete elimination of the weaklings, so that their own time, 
the money of trustful patrons or commonwealths, and the pro- 
ductive power of expert teachers may not be wasted. 
If college graduates pass into the secondary schools with- 
out fitness for their duty as teachers, who is to blame? Some 
say that the fault is theirs; some, that it lay in the college 
which received them with faulty preparation and confined 
them to narrow and narrowing scholastic paths, or else per- 
