988 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXV. No. 652 



uate course. He may then get an instruet- 

 orship at the University of Texas; and 

 if he does well he may be offered an as- 

 sistant professorship in the University of 

 California; and finally be called to a full 

 professorship at the University of Mich- 

 igan. Nor is such an imaginary career 

 an exaggeration of what is continually 

 happening. Every considerable graduate 

 school has planted its sons in universities 

 throughout the land; and everywhere that 

 such a man goes he spreads the light from 

 the place he has come from, and gets more 

 light from the men that he meets in his 

 new place. Methods of work, and tone of 

 thought, as well as pure knowledge and 

 ideas, are diffused by such men far better 

 than they can be through books, which con- 

 tain only the final results of scholarship. 

 The many learned bodies that have adopted 

 the habit of meeting during the Christmas 

 recess, composed almost whoUy of pro- 

 fessors, are most suggestive illustrations of 

 how homogeneous in tone our universities 

 are from one end of the country to the 

 other. The college faculties form, indeed, 

 one great brotherhood, with common as- 

 pirations and tone of thought, a brother- 

 hood that has its ramifications everywhere, 

 and everywhere has charge of the great 

 sources of the intellectual life of the future. 

 But the work of the universities in bring- 

 ing all parts of the nation into intellectual 

 harmony is not due solely, or perhaps 

 mainly, to similarity in the corps of in- 

 structors. It results also from the fact 

 that the students themselves come from all 

 parts of the land. To take first the purely 

 professional schools: A student coming 

 from wheresoever it may be, who learns his 

 medicine at Johns Hopkins, his engineering 

 at Yale, or his law at Harvard, goes back 

 to his home not only with a knowledge of 

 his profession, but a broader man than he 

 was before ; and he never loses the inspira- 

 tion that comes from study in a really great 



school. He has a higher ideal, a broader 

 outlook, than he could have acquired in a 

 merely local institution, however good the 

 purely technical teaching might be; and 

 everywhere that he practises in after-life 

 he helps to maintain the principles of his 

 profession, and to advance its higher in- 

 terests better, because he has studied in a 

 school of national reputation, where stu- 

 dents come from every part of the United 

 States. In such a case it is clearly an ad- 

 vantage that the men from different places 

 should be brought into as close contact as 

 possible; and, therefore, I have regretted 

 that the graduates of Yale, who come to the 

 Harvard Law School in considerable num- 

 bers every year, should have fallen into the 

 habit of living together in a remote dormi- 

 tory, instead of being scattered among the 

 other students of the school. Their class- 

 mates would benefit greatly by being 

 thrown with them more intimately, and no 

 doubt they would also gain something them- 

 selves. Prom the same point of view the 

 policy on the part of all ambitious univer- 

 sities of establishing schools to fit for every 

 conceivable profession may be open to seri- 

 ous objection, especially in cases where the 

 total demand of the community for mem- 

 bers of that profession is small. Are we 

 not sometimes in danger of sacrificing the 

 general welfare to the desire of an institu- 

 tion to be complete in itself? 



But, after all, the strictly professional 

 schools— and for that matter the graduate 

 school, which is mainly a professional 

 school for teachers of secondary or univer- 

 sity grade— all these schools touch men 

 mainly at one point. The thoughts of the 

 students there are so centered in the sub- 

 jects they are studying, that while there 

 can be no doubt that they get much good 

 from their fellows in many other ways, 

 nevertheless the broadening influence of the 

 university upon them is brought to bear 

 chiefly through their special line of work. 



