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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XL. No. 1038 



course of non-athletic and citizen-building 

 functions, but is going further and making the 

 college a leader and light among others in the 

 land. Would that some one would offer a prize 

 for some pregnant symbol, seal or even slogan 

 or song typifying this unique conjunction, 

 which college and university should forever 

 unite to use! Could we not fitly commemo- 

 rate this occasion by a new resolve that there 

 shall never be tension or strain between us, 

 and that a policy of mutual help shall hence- 

 forth animate us both? 



In the recent voluminous literature on col- 

 leges, so much under discussion of late, we 

 have several characterizations of the ideal 

 college professor, and these agree pretty well. 

 He must be a good man, a model citizen, a 

 gentleman and a scholar, a teacher born, made 

 or both, tactful, and in close personal rela- 

 tions with his students, anxious and able to 

 teach them all they are capable of learning in 

 his department, a man whose character will 

 be normative and influential for good, fitting 

 students, not for the university, nor even for 

 professional or technical careers chiefly, but 

 for their work in life in general, and evoking 

 all their powers. Noble as are all these traits 

 of nature and nurture, and rare as is their 

 combination, and exacting as are the condi- 

 tions of instruction and parental care, many 

 college professors go further and are not even 

 content with the useful work of malting text- 

 books, but really add to the sum of human 

 knowledge by their researches, and it is a sat- 

 isfaction to us that so many of those here are 

 with and of us in this respect. 



For the university professor research is his 

 prime function. He must specialize more 

 sharply, must not only keep in constant and 

 vital rapport with everything that every crea- 

 tive mind is doing in his field the world over, 

 but he must hear and lay to heart every syl- 

 lable that the muse of his department utters 

 to every co-worker everywhere, and best of 

 all, she must also speak new words through 

 him. There is a vital sense in which he 

 stands in closer relation to his co-workers in 

 other lands than to his colleagues in the same 

 institution. The chief momentum of the vital 



push-up in him impels him to penetrate ever 

 a little farther into the unknown, to erect 

 some kiosk in Kamchatka, where he can 

 wrest some new secret from the sphinx, who 

 has far more to reveal than all she has yet 

 told. Whenever he grows impotent to do this, 

 he becomes only an emeritus knight of the 

 holy ghost of science. Studies of the age 

 when men in various departments do their 

 best work show that scientists are the oldest 

 of all the creators of culture values on the 

 average, but that there is more individual 

 variation, so that they cross the dead line 

 both older and younger than any others. It 

 is one of the hardest things in the world to be 

 and remain a productive investigator. There 

 are so many journals and books to be read, so 

 many and constant alterations and adapta- 

 tions, needful to press the questions we ask 

 nature home and to get an answer, such 

 changes of methods and apparatus, so much 

 that was yesterday new and will to-morrow be 

 obsolete if we would not abandon what Janet 

 calls " la fonction du reelle," and take some 

 kind of flight from reality and its ever-press- 

 ing devoir present. But if research is hard 

 and the life it demands beset with dangers, so 

 that many are always falling by the way with- 

 out giving any sign of their demise to out- 

 siders, this work has its supreme reward, and 

 I can not believe that there is any joy life 

 has to offer quite so great as the Eureka joy 

 of a new discovery. 



Not only this work itself, but its conditions 

 are amazingly complex, unstable, and ever 

 shifting. Just at present it seems to me that 

 academic unrest was never quite so great the 

 world over, and that the near future never 

 promised so many important changes. Some 

 abuses, great and small, have of late grown 

 rank and demand remedy. Certain vicious 

 tendencies must be corrected and reforms 

 made. Bear with me if I ask you to glance 

 briefly at a few of these. 



Beginning with the Teutonic countries, 

 since 190Y the assistant professors and docents 

 have developed a strong inter-institutional or- 

 ganization against the head or full professors. 

 The unprecedentedly rapid growth in the size 



