760 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLI. No. 1064 



liave been forced upon me ; but it is one that all 

 who have come out here, with ideals such as 

 mine, have been forced sooner or later to 

 meet. The issue should have been placed 

 squarely before me two years ago when I was 

 considering the position. Had I then known 

 that research was practically impossible I 

 should never have come to the northwest. One 

 can never learn the true conditions of an ap- 

 pointment from correspondence with the ad- 

 ministrative officers. They are naturally 

 biased. For that reason I have written this 

 letter. I sincerely hope that it will enable 

 others to choose less blindly than I. 



X. 



A TYPICAL CASE 



Professor 



graduated at 



University and, taking a postgraduate course, 

 received the degree of Ph.D. He then went 



abroad, studied at University, and 



returned to America, full of enthusiasm for 

 original research. He had published an im- 

 portant memoir for a thesis which was well re- 

 ceived, his instructors encouraged him and his 

 fellow students appreciated and were interested 

 in his work. 



He now received an offer of a professorship 

 in a small country college, married and began 

 his new life, expecting to continue his inves- 

 tigations. He soon found that almost all his 

 strength was consumed in teaching, and was 

 horrified at the end of his first year that his 

 salary had not been increased, as had been 

 promised upon satisfactory service. This in- 

 duced him to review his forces and readjust to 

 the situation. He assumed a more sympathetic 

 attitude toward the tyro and looked deeper 

 into the organization and purposes of the in- 

 stitution. He began to fall in with the teach- 

 ing problem and reduced the expenses of his 

 department by taking a larger number of 

 classes himself and for a nominal sum em- 

 ployed a few bright iipper classmen a few 

 hours weekly to do the drudgery. He attacked 

 the problem of efficiency in instruction and 

 found himself well equipped for the under- 

 taking, for the machinery of his superior 

 training gave a diamond point to his drill in 

 the form of system and habits of thought, and 



this was backed up by the battering-ram of a 

 growing enthusiasm. 



He also became interested in the historical 

 and vocational aspects of his subject and began 

 to relate himself and his work to the world he 

 lived in. In process of time his ideas began 

 to show themselves in increased comfort and 

 efficiency in the lives of human beings. Hia 

 teaching task was now a magnet to all his 

 powers, while his classes forgot their examina- 

 tions in the joy of their daily lessons. 



On the Olympic heights of the university 

 he had learned to despise the role of the sturdy 

 farmer and faithful wife who were responsible 

 for his birth and education and much of the 

 ethics of that parental pair had become a mere 

 convention or a timely expedient. But there 

 stole into the years of the busy Ph.D. a re- 

 newed conviction of the high worth of social 

 purity, and his fictitious ideas of temperance, 

 kindness, etc., gave way to principles more in 

 keeping with his earlier teaching, while he 

 ceased to despise the ultimate source of his 

 bread and butter. 



The finding of such men as this — men adapt- 

 able to the highest needs of the small country 

 college — would be a worthy object for a Com- 

 mittee of One Hundred. 



S. L. Macdonald 



FoKT Collins, Colo. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 

 Animal Experimentation and Medical Prog- 

 ress. By William Williams Keen, M.D., 

 LL.D., professor emeritus of surgery, Jeffer- 

 son Medical College, Philadelphia, with an 

 Introduction by Charles W. Eliot, LL.D., 

 president emeritus of Harvard University. 

 Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin 

 Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 

 1914. Pp. xxvi + 312. 



In this book Dr. Keen has brought together 

 the thirteen papers on experimentation which 

 he has published in various periodicals during 

 the past twenty-nine years. Nine of these deal 

 chiefly with the contributions which this 

 method of research has made to medical — and 

 chiefly surgical — ^progress, while the remaining 

 papers are devoted to the antivivisectionists 

 and what they have been doing. Not him- 



