SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XII. No. 300. 



The best and most interesting portions of the 

 treatise are the monographs of Volume I. , and 

 the four monographs of Volume II., on 'Pro- 

 fessional Education,' 'Scientific, Technical and 

 Engineering Education,' 'The Education of 

 Defectives,' and 'Scientific Societies and As- 

 sociations. ' The last-named paper is the iirst 

 appropriate recognition, in print, of extremely 

 important and far-reaching organized influences 

 on our educational activity. 



The sins of omission, referred to above are 

 perhaps due to haste in preparation, and to an 

 exaggerated fear of producing too large a 

 treatise. The time for preparation was, doubt- 

 less, short, and limitations of size are, of course, 

 necessarily imposed on public documents. 

 Nevertheless, the absence of a monograph on 

 physical training and athletics, or, at least, of a 

 discussion of this topic in connection with school 

 hygiene ; the omission of all mention, save in- 

 cidentally, of evening schools, of which the 

 number and variety are large ; the omission of a 

 monograph on the different kinds of our private 

 and endowed schools, some of which, both old 

 and new, are among our most cherished educa- 

 tional resources, and extremely useful in meet- 

 ing some educational needs not yet adequately 

 met by public schools ; the omission of all 

 mention of vacation schools, even if these 

 schools are not yet sufficiently developed to be 

 entitled to a separate monograph ; — these omis- 

 sions from a work exhibiting the educational 

 resources and problems of the United States 

 are to be regretted. So too, it is difficult to see 

 why manual training should not be entitled to a 

 separate monograph as well as commercial 

 education. The writer of the monograph on 

 'Art and Industrial Education,' necessarily 

 confined himself largely — and, apparently, with 

 no space to spare — to drawing and art ; the 

 result is that manual training is nowhere 

 adequately discussed in the entire treatise. 

 No one can doubt that it should be. 



Similarly some of the monographs suffer un- 

 necessarily by condensation. In Mr. Draper's 

 paper on ' Organization and Administration ' 

 the historical introduction is too brief and 

 fragmentary to possess much value ; and there 

 is not, in the paper, even a single illustra- 

 tion of the actual organization and important 



details of the administration of the school 

 system of an American city. Moreover the 

 whole paper is, with one exception, the shortest 

 in the entire series ; and yet the topic with 

 which it deals is second to none in importance. 

 So too, the paper on ' Secondary Education, ' 

 which is one of the most valuable and interest- 

 ing of them all, lacks a very important detail. 

 Mr. Brown justly gives adequate attention 

 to the importance assumed by electives in our 

 secondary education ; and while he very prop- 

 erly points out that, in some form, electives 

 have long been recognized in our secondary 

 school programs, his monograph does not 

 clearly convey the impression — as it should — 

 that there are many schools throughout the 

 country to-day in which the elective system is 

 dominant. This could have been done easily 

 by inserting two or three typical programs of 

 such schools. 



The elective system naturally receives atten- 

 tion again in Mr. West's monograph on ' The 

 American College.' From the general tone of 

 Mr. West's presentation it is not difficult to 

 conclude that he does not favor an elective 

 college course for the B. A. degree. After 

 citing several examples of the different ways 

 in which elective courses for the B. A. degree 

 are administered, Mr. West remarks, "These 

 examples are sufiicient to indicate the variety 

 of meaning found in colleges which have 

 changed the historical significance of the Bach- 

 elor of Arts degree." No doubt they are. But 

 they convey no impression of the richer and 

 deeper culture for each individual which the 

 B. A. degree represents under an elective sys- 

 tem as compared with a prescribed system, in 

 our better colleges, and they do convey the idea 

 that, on the whole, the ' changed historical sig- 

 nificance ' of the B. A. degree as conferred by 

 these institutions is neither widely accepted nor 

 generally approved ; and this, to say the least, 

 is an extremely doubtful assumption. 



But it is unnecessary to extend examination 

 to other details of this important series of 

 monographs. In spite of some important omis- 

 sions and occasional minor defects in detail, the 

 work is, as stated in the beginning of this re- 

 view, a timely and valuable addition to our ed- 

 ucational literature. It will serve to give a 



