CHARLES RICHARD VAN HISE 695 
of notable value. His most conspicuous service was the aid he 
rendered in the conservation and allocation of our food resources. 
As the war drew to a close he became especially interested in the 
formation of a League of Nations. He prepared an address on 
this subject in which, with his ever-present regard for the practical 
and the attainable, he drew with greater definiteness than most 
other advocates the features which such a league should, in his 
judgment, embody. ‘This was essentially his last contribution 
to the public welfare. 
As the administrator of a great educational institution he 
naturally regarded science as the bed rock on which educational 
practice should be based, but he did not interpret science in any 
narrow or technical sense; he viewed it broadly as an expression 
of the carefully sifted and thoroughly proved reality disclosed in 
each and every field of inquiry. Research as an indispensable 
condition for discovering, demonstrating, and enlarging the body 
of science, as also for rescrutinizing and renovating that which had 
previously passed for science, he held absolutely essential to a true 
university. He went farther and regarded it as essential also to 
education in all grades; for the renovation, the reconstruction, and 
the reshaping of the subject-matter taught in all the grades he held 
scarcely less vital to primary education and the public welfare 
than the addition of new subject-matter on the frontiers of knowl- 
edge. Important as he held original research to be, however, he 
held its application to the affairs of life and its incorporation into 
the lives of citizens as a working, guiding, inspiring factor to be an 
equally important function and an equally imperative obligation 
of a state institution. He was fortunate in coming into the presi- 
dency of an institution whose working lines were already set in 
the directions he approved. With this inherited advantage he 
pushed the university forward in its adopted lines with great 
SUCCESS. 
Respecting the debatable borderland between what is to be 
regarded as a permissible function of a state university, on the one 
hand, and what is to be regarded as non-permissible, or scarcely 
permissible—particularly in matters where organized bodies of 
citizens differ—on the other, President Van Hise was rather strongly 
