810 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIX. No. 491. 



reney in China. I had the pleasure a few 

 weeks- ago of listening to a very instructive 

 address on Chinese banking by a scholarly 

 native of that country, who reminded us of 

 the time, in the seventies, when one of our 

 New England firms thought that it would 

 be a very nice thing to take over a lot 

 of trade dollars— a thousand or more, to 

 China, in order that the good standard coin, 

 stamped with the sign manual of a good 

 responsible nation, might be passed into 

 the Chinese circulation, but he stated that 

 before these trade dollars had been in China 

 a, month they were all melted down into 

 bullion and the bullion was cast into 

 the 'shoes' current in China— stamped with 

 the imprint of the firms which chose to 

 make them up in this form and guarantee 

 their purity and weight. Now I take it 

 that in this matter of the stamp of educa- 

 tional institutions we are really dealing 

 with the same kind of currency question. 

 Those of us who are called on to train men 

 are turned to for an expression of opinion 

 as to what those men are worth, and what- 

 ever that expression of opinion may be, 

 and the value of it, are largely a matter of 

 the convenience of the people our men may 

 be thrown in with afterwards. I think we 

 recognize that all of the percentage grad- 

 ings, and all of the academic distinctions 

 and classifications, and all of the honors 

 that come in middle and old age^ are merely 

 expressions of belief; that the real thing 

 we are trying to do is to make men useful, 

 and that all marks of approval are merely 

 secondary, accessory matters. 



If we are agreed on this, however, I 

 think that we are agreed that although 

 e?nls, they are for the time being neces- 

 sary evils. It does seem necessary that 

 there should be a good deal of this vouch- 

 ing for people. With the greater com- 

 plexity of our, civilization and of our edu- 

 cational institutions, it becomes more and 

 more necessary, apparently, that there shall 



be some of this sort of secondary designa- 

 tion, other than that which men can give 

 themselves by going into the market and 

 performing life's work; and for that rea- 

 son we have this very question of degrees 

 standing out prominently before us as in- 

 vestigators and teachers. 



The subject that is before us this after- 

 noon is one that can be made a very fruit- 

 ful subject of discussion, not with refer- 

 ence to any action that the American So- 

 ciety of Naturalists may take in regard to 

 it, not, perhaps, with reference to indi- 

 vidual action that any society may take, 

 but that through discussion some of the 

 undesirable features of the present practise 

 may in time be remodeled and replaced by 

 a greater simplicity, and with a greater 

 expressiveness, perhaps, in what is done. 



With this preface to the work before us, 

 I wish to call upon the first of the speakers 

 who have agreed to take part in the dis- 

 cussion this afternoon, President Jordan of 

 Stanford University. 



Dr. Jordan: 



Mr. Chairman, I was rather hoping that 

 somebody that did not agree with us would 

 come in between you and me, so that I 

 might have something to stir me up to a 

 little enthusiasm, something that would re- 

 mind us of the old times when Professor 

 Coulter and I fought on the bloody sands 

 of Indiana against most of the other school- 

 men of that state. 



I have felt in regard to degrees very 

 much as Caligula did when he said that he 

 wished the Roman people had but one 

 neck, so that he could despatch it with one 

 blow. I have felt that it might be well if. 

 the degrees could be unified, and, taking 

 them all together, we could abolish them at 

 one blow. But doubtless, as the president 

 has said, the degree is among the necessary 

 evils of our time. Certainly no one institu- 

 tion could abolish degrees without distinct 



