DECEMBER 10, 1897.] 
before he becomes an independent member 
of society. 
And this is not the worst of it. In the 
profession of medicine, as in all other pro- 
fessions, book-lore or professional lore is 
only a part of the foundation for successful 
practice. A knowledge of mankind, of 
men and women, is more essential than a 
finished knowledge of his profession. At 
twenty-seven or twenty-eight a man is too 
old to acquire this knowledge in the best 
way; the plasticity of youth is waning, and 
new habits are hard to form. He must re- 
main more or less controlled by his student 
habits, out of intimate touch with the great 
mass of the people and their inner life. 
And this lack of knowledge of human na- 
ture must surely remain as an obstacle to 
the most useful and successful practice. 
President Eliot has said : ‘“‘ The average 
age of admission to Harvard College at this 
moment is fully nineteen. The student 
who stays here four years is twenty-three 
years old when he graduates. He then goes 
’ to our medical school to stay four years ; 
so he is twenty-seven years of age before 
he has his medical degree, and we all know 
that some years intervene between that 
achievement and the competency to sup- 
porta family. Now, that highly educated 
young man ought to have married at 
twenty-five.” 
The same conditions will surely confront 
the lawyer before long, and not only the 
lawyer, but the dentist, the theologian and 
students of other learned professions. 
An answer that is brought as a solution 
for this unsatisfactory state of affairs is that 
the fault is in the preparatory schools. 
That poor teachers and poor teaching make 
the work of preparation for the college 
longer than need be, is very true, but I do 
not think that any relief obtained here will 
influence students toward the college of 
liberal arts. As teaching in the secondary 
schools become better and more efficient, 
SCIENCE. 
865 
other subjects will be crowded into the 
high school course, filling in all the time 
that is saved. This will be of added ad- 
vantage to the professional student and 
will more and more tend to lead him away 
from the college of liberal arts. Further- 
more, none of the colleges of the United 
States have shown much, if any, tendency 
to shorten the course leading to, or ren- 
der less difficult the requirements for, the 
Bachelor of Arts degree. 
The entrance requirements for the med- 
ical and law schools are at the present time 
very unsatisfactory. The medical schools 
have labored unceasingly to increase them 
for the medical degree, during the past ten 
years, so far as professional knowledge is 
concerned, but they have done very little 
towards increasing the requirements for ad- . 
mission to the schools. In very few schools 
are they at all equivalent to those for ad- 
mission to the freshman class in the better 
colleges of liberal arts. A very little knowl- 
edge of some foreign language, usually Latin 
is required ; a little mathematics and a lit- 
tle physics, and a passable knowledge of — 
English ; but the student needs very little of 
what the world calls liberal culture, and 
practically nothing whatever is demanded. 
After considering these chaotic entrance 
conditions to the professional colleges of 
law and medicine, it is refreshing to turn 
to another, in which, with but little preten- 
sion, with modesty and deprecation, rather, 
a model has been set which all the other 
professions will, in the end, surely follow. 
The engineering profession to-day is, 
upon the whole, the best educated in 
America. While there may be a smaller 
proportion of highly trained men, there is 
also afar smaller proportion of poorly 
trained ones than in either medicine or 
law. It may seem strange that that pro- 
fession which comes less into immediate 
contact with the general public should be, 
upon the whole, more highly trained than 
