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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXIX. No. 741 



tions, technical, professional and scien- 

 tific! Is such intertwining, is such over- 

 lapping and interlacing of functions 

 unwholesome? I think not. I myself 

 welcome the union of technical studies 

 with those which involve a more general 

 cultivation. Men grow so differently, ma- 

 ture at such unequal rates, are cultivated 

 by such different sorts of work, and can 

 use their general cultivation, if they have 

 any, for such various technical purposes, 

 that, for my part I suppose one of the 

 notable functions of an academic institu- 

 tion to be the uniting rather than the 

 further sundering of the various more or 

 less learned activities of modem life, the 

 humanizing of engineers, and the prepara- 

 tion of the young followers of the humani- 

 ties for some practical service of mankind. 

 "Whatever the functions of "the college" 

 then, it is impossible to treat these func- 

 tions so as sharply to sunder them from 

 the functions of technical schools. We 

 ought not to say to any one separate class 

 of young men: You want cultivation. 

 That is good. We will therefore give you 

 four years of pure cultivation. There- 

 after you shall be ready to undertake 

 something else, which is not cultivation 

 but is your life-work. There are indeed 

 some men who are best trained in just this 

 way. But there are also very various 

 sorts of men in whose cases the most dif- 

 ferent kinds and degrees of union of 

 technical with non-technical types of 

 training form the best means of educa- 

 eation. Our undergraduate instruction 

 must reckon with these various sorts of 

 men. We must offer to them various in- 

 termediate kinds of education. And we 

 need to have these various sorts of men 

 kept in social relation with one another 

 as they mature. The fortunes of "the col- 

 lege" must not be sundered from those of 

 the technical schools. And this is what 

 the state universities have taught us. 



Equally impossible it is to keep asunder, 

 as some theorists wish to do, collegiate in- 

 struction and what is called graduate pro- 

 fessional instruction. I have for years 

 heard colleagues of mine protest against 

 permitting instruction which they regarded 

 as professional in its nature to count 

 towards a college degree. I have never 

 been able to get from these colleagues 

 any general definition of what, in the 

 modem world, constitutes the distinguish- 

 ing mark of a professional study. Of 

 course there are professions, notably law 

 and medicine, which can draw their own 

 sharp lines between their particular pro- 

 fessional studies and all non-professional 

 studies. These professions wisely begin 

 their training at a definite point, prefer- 

 ably no doubt with college graduates. But 

 then these particular professions are con- 

 cerned with topics, and with a sort of 

 technique, which can be begun only when 

 the student has a fairly definable degree 

 of maturity. You can not make a young 

 boy a nurse, and you can not wisely begin 

 to give him early clinical instruction. 

 Fragments of legal lore, introduced into 

 undergraduate instruction, tend, we are 

 told, rather to hinder than to help the later 

 work of the law school. So here sharp 

 lines can be authoritatively drawn. But 

 in modern life there are many professions, 

 and, in case of some of these, the boy can 

 already do what it will be almost neces- 

 sary for the future professional man to 

 have done as early as possible. I was once 

 told by an old sea-captain that an essen- 

 tial part of his life's training was learned 

 in his sailboat, in the harbor at home, 

 when he was a boy, and that he therefore 

 wholly doubted the power of even the best 

 modern naval training school to make 

 a trustworthy ship 's officer out of anybody 

 who had not begun to learn the sailor's 

 trade in early boyhood. I need not say 

 that my captain was not alone in this con- 



