December 15, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



Til 



since the beginnings of what is now the 

 elective system appeared in Harvard Col- 

 lege. It is more than sixty years since 

 Francis Wayland published his 'Thoughts 

 on the Collegiate System of the United 

 States, ' a work which led a few years later 

 to the temporary adoption of a voluntary 

 method at Brown University. For the first 

 forty years of this long period the progress 

 in liberty of choice for the student was 

 slow; but for the last forty years it has 

 been rapid, partly because of the great 

 number of new subjects which have forced 

 themselves on the attention of the educated 

 public and the business world, and partly 

 because the resources of the institutions of 

 higher education in the United States have 

 increased during the last half of this period 

 very much more rapidly than they did 

 during the first half. 



In the long discussion of the effects of the 

 elective system disproportionate attention 

 has been given to the effect on the student 

 of the liberty to select his studies from a 

 large number of various courses. The most 

 far-reaching effects of the elective system 

 are its effects on the profession of teaching 

 as a whole, and on national scholarship. 

 Through the working of the system, the 

 range of studies in the American universi- 

 ties, not for undergraduates only, but for 

 graduates and professors, has been greatly 

 widened. The standards of attainment for 

 both teachers and taught have been much 

 raised; intellectual efficiency has increased 

 and the expectations and duties of the uni- 

 versities with regard to their own product- 

 iveness and influence have been exalted. 

 The academic world of to-day hardly re- 

 members the intellectual poverty of the 

 American college of fifty years ago, when 

 the entire amount of instruction offered by 

 most colleges was the amount which a 

 single student could absorb in four years- 

 most of it being, of course, strictly elemen- 

 tary in quality, as well as thus closely lim- 



ited in quantity. The titles of some of the 

 older professorships in Harvard College 

 indicate the expectation that one professor 

 could occupy satisfactorily several large 

 fields; thus, the professor on the Alford 

 foundation, which dates from 1789, was 

 expected to cover natural religion, moral 

 philosophy and civil polity, and down to 

 1871 that small part of his time which this 

 one professor could give to civil polity 

 provided all the instruction there was in 

 Harvard University in the subject of 

 economics. The HoUis professorship of 

 mathematics and natural philosophy was 

 founded in 1727; and no other professor- 

 ship of mathematics existed in the univer- 

 sity for one hundred years, the one HoUis 

 professor having charge of mathematics 

 and of the entire subject which now goes 

 under the general name of physics. There 

 are still in the United States some colleges 

 where the professors occupy not chairs but 

 settees, as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes said 

 of himself when he taught anatomy, physi- 

 ology and microscopy; but these settees are 

 fast falling to pieces. The change from a 

 uniform prescribed curriculum, through 

 which the college undertook to carry on to 

 graduation almost all the young men who 

 entered together in any given year, to a 

 range of studies so wide that no two stu- 

 dents need pursue precisely the same course 

 between entrance and graduation has been 

 very wholesome all over the country in 

 another respect— it has made the college 

 less an administrative machine for turning 

 out an average routine product, and more 

 a living fountain of individual scholarly 

 interest and ambition. 



V. 



The large and strong universities in 

 America are alike in their general purpose 

 to provide good training for all the pro- 

 fessions or intellectual occupations. It was 

 two endowed institutions— Harvard and 



