September 4, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



345 



finished the routine of the first semester with 

 distinguished grades — at my particular uni- 

 versity, grades of 5 + or above, on a scale of 

 A, B, 0, D, E. 



Such freshmen, then, are segregated in a 

 special section, the purpose of which is care- 

 fully explained to them beforehand, and for 

 which, indeed, they have been encouraged to 

 work from the time their ability was dis- 

 covered ; clever, " literary " writers are design- 

 edly eliminated, and pressure to enter the sec- 

 tion is brought to bear upon students in sci- 

 ence, engineering and law. Let me note in 

 passing that few girls elect the course — at 

 least, as yet. The weekly papers that are 

 written are from three to six pages in length; 

 their nature can best be indicated by present- 

 ing some of the topics actually written upon. 

 I doubt exceedingly whether either expert or 

 laymen would question the value of the topics ; 

 the expert will rightly question, a priori, the 

 ability of a mere rhetoric instructor to criti- 

 cize the themes. 



Mill — "On the Liberty of Thought and Discus- 

 sion." 

 Would Mill Accept a Position on the Board of 



Censors for American Papers? 

 Mill and the Suppression of the Cosmopolitan. 

 Mill and the Study of Sex Hygiene in High 



School. 

 What are Truth and Error? 

 Are Christian Missionaries Persecutors of Free- 

 dom of Thought? 

 Does Mathematical Truth Differ from Ethical? 

 Mr. Roosevelt and Some of his Assumptions of 

 Infallibility. 

 Morley- — "On the Possible Utility of Error." 

 The Effect on Mankind of Sudden, Supreme, 

 Universal Conviction that There Is No God of 

 any Kind (Use method of classification). 

 Should Children Bead Fairy-tales? 

 Were An Absolute Cure for Vicious Diseases lo 

 be Discovered, Should the "Truth" be 

 Spread? 

 A Half-truth of Modern Science. 

 Huxley — ' ' Darwin on the Origin of Species. ' ' 

 The Evidence of Hybridization — Does it Support 



Darwin to-day? 

 The ArohcEopteryx — its Relation to the Pterosaur 

 and the Compsognothus as a Proof of Evo- 

 lution — of Darwinism? 



The Electric Fishes — How have the Neo-Darwin- 



ians Met the Problem? 

 Is a Darwinian an Atheist? 



Is there a Fallacy in the Syllogism upon which 

 the Discrimination of Species from Varieties 

 Depends ? 

 Some Theoretical Objections to the Darwinian 

 Explanation of Secondary Sexual Character- 

 istics. 

 " Ponderous topics for a rhetoric Ph.D. to 

 pass judgment upon ? " Yes, my dear scientist 

 or political economist, I echo the satire — the 

 more so because, in my own case, I was reluc- 

 tantly led to do much graduate work in vari- 

 ous remote fields of literature. Still, though 

 rhetoric instructors are poorly prepared to teach 

 sensible courses in composition, the matter is 

 not so bad as it appears on the surface. If the 

 captious critic will examine the topics given, 

 he will note that they fall into two distinct 

 groups : one type of subject may be written 

 upon without research; the other certainly re- 

 quires special knowledge. Surely, in watching 

 a student detect logical fallacies in Morley or 

 Huxley, the rhetoric instructor is at home; 

 he has long taught argumentation. The re- 

 search topics the "canny" instructor can 

 easily limit to his own immediate knowledge. 

 E. g., from books and from colleagues one can 

 gather information concerning the archaeop- 

 teryx, the eohippus or the amphioxus; and no 

 rhetoric instructor need despair of grasping 

 the essentials of the planetesimal hypothesis or 

 the theory of mutations. For distinctly per- 

 sonal reasons, I should not this year allow a 

 student to write upon the effect the discovery 

 of radium had upon any given detail of the 

 atomic theory; next year I may even have 

 apprehended a little on that subject. More- 

 over, let it be instantly admitted, this course 

 in modern thought is essentially a course in 

 logic and composition; I am interested in 

 using science or political economy only be- 

 cause it affords resistant material to set the 

 freshman's teeth in. What he is to detect is 

 that Darwinism proper is as free from athe- 



3 Particularly Planck's Rectorial address in the 

 current (July) number. 



