June 5, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



813 



eially for the young man who never before 

 experienced the joy of knowing beautiful 

 and general results which have never been 

 published. 



It is, however, essential that these new re- 

 sults should be both beautiful and general 

 in comparison with the many elegant things 

 which have been found out by others. The 

 great danger is that an instructor will find 

 mainly non-interesting and trivial results 

 in comparison with the many important 

 known results which his students have not 

 yet mastered. In view of the great differ- 

 ences in research capacities of university 

 professors it is very difficult to give limits 

 as regards the amount of original work 

 which may properly be incorporated into 

 our graduate courses. 



All of us could doubtless point to clear 

 instances where students have suffered 

 greatly on account of injustice along this 

 line. The extreme cases of the promoter 

 graft are almost as vicious as the extreme 

 cases of the incompetency graft. In many 

 instances the former are the more difficult 

 to correct since a large amount of the 

 knowledge in the subject concerned is es- 

 sential for judging the merits of such a 

 question. Moreover, in view of the com- 

 parative infrequency of these cases the pub- 

 lic has not yet been educated to denounce 

 them with sufficient severity. 



In recent years there has been a rapid 

 increase in the number of scholarships and 

 felowships in our American universities. 

 About twenty years ago G. Stanley Hall 

 published, in Volume 17 of the Forum, an 

 article in which he gave a list of the schol- 

 arships and fellowships which were then 

 available for graduate work in our univer- 

 sities. By comparing this list with those 

 which are now available, we shall note a re- 

 markable change. 



Those who are always looking for some 

 kind of graft have found a fruitful field of 



operation in these scholarships and fellow- 

 ships. It has not been uncommon for a 

 professor to appropriate a large part of the 

 time of the students who were picked with 

 a special view to their promise to develop 

 into research men, and who needed all their 

 time for their scholarly development. For- 

 tunately these plunders are becoming less 

 common and our attitude towards scholar- 

 ships and fellowships is improving. In 

 some universities it is almost ideal. 



These scholarships and fellowships have, 

 however, some unfortunate features since 

 they frequently attract young people to in- 

 stitutions and to departments which can 

 offer very few other attractions for the 

 graduate student. The student who is 

 thinking of doing research work can not be 

 warned too strongly in reference to the 

 scholarship and fellowship traps set by vari- 

 ous institutions which are poorly equipped 

 for graduate work. Fortunately, many of 

 the best equipped institutions also offer 

 such inducements, and the most capable 

 and most cautious students are not apt to 

 suffer. On the contrary, such students fre- 

 quently derive a great amount of good from 

 the assistance thus received. 



There is no doubt about the fact that a 

 graduate student who comes to a university 

 under the influence of financial assistance 

 from the university is often inclined to con- 

 sider the channels of this influence. Hence 

 he will generally not feel quite as free, as 

 the one who is not thus encumbered, to act 

 independently as regards his courses or the 

 sources where he seeks information about 

 them. This tends to increase administra- 

 tive influence at the expense of the influ- 

 ence of scholarship, and often leads to what 

 deserves the name of administrative graft. 



While graduate scholarships and fellow- 

 ships may tend somewhat toward graft, it 

 is not implied that they offer a very serious 

 problem along this line. They merely call 



