July 31, 1903.] 



SCIENCE. 



133 



grade scholars in the medical profession, 

 and hopes for better things in the future. 

 But I have little sympathy with either his 

 hopes or his desires. 



In his analysis of the careers which 

 these scholars have followed in the past 

 sixty years, Professor Thorndike makes no 

 mention of the profession of engineering. 

 It is to be inferred that there have been 

 no Phi Beta Kappa scholars who have be- 

 come engineei*s, or at least that the number 

 is so small as to be negligible. The fact 

 is stai'tling, as it also is pregnant with 

 meaning. Has the educational concept of 

 scholarship been such that two of the chief 

 learned professions have been almost ex- 

 cluded therefrom? Or would it be more 

 reasonable to suppose that the Phi Beta 

 Kappa, like the Sigma Xi, is really a broad 

 society of specialists? The reason so few 

 Phi Beta Kappas have chosen the engineer- 

 ing profession is not diflScult to undei-- 

 stand. It has happened that the educa- 

 tion of engineers has for years been moi-e 

 nearly in line with modern educational 

 progress than that of any other of the 

 learned professions. It really has been 

 the one profession in America which has 

 served as a model for all others in educa- 

 tion, a model toward which all others 

 are rapidly approaching. The profession 

 early recognized the fact, possibly because 

 it was not dignified with the appellation 

 of learned, and did not, therefore, see the 

 need of the so-called learned culture, that 

 the most successful results must come, 

 without neglecting other useful and cul- 

 tural studies, from an early, consistent and 

 rational specialization. Can any one be- 

 lieve that the profession would stand 

 where it does to-daj', richly meriting the 

 title of learned, that it would have accom- 

 plished the tremendous results it has. had 

 it followed the methods so long in vogue 

 in the medical and legal professions, 

 the adding of a year or two of purely 



didactic professional instruction upon any 

 sort of a foundation? Because the engi- 

 neering profession stood so far in advance 

 of all other professions in its systems of 

 education seventeen years ago, and be- 

 cause Phi Beta Kappa would not admit 

 that any other sj-stem than its own could 

 produce scholars, we have to-day the So- 

 ciety of the Sigma Xi, now firmly estab- 

 lished in nearly all of our best universities. 

 The medical profession tried too long and 

 tried in vain to polish off the general 

 scholar or the no scholar into the special 

 scholar. But it is recognizing its error, 

 recognizing that the best success means 

 not so much more years of study as an 

 earlier and rational specialization. 



It is a fact, pretty well recognized by 

 the science teacher, that the average col- 

 lege graduate, who has had no special sci- 

 entific training, has no advantage in the 

 laboratory over the average graduate of 

 the high school. The latter has not so 

 much to forget and he has not forgotten 

 so much, his youthful plasticity is less im- 

 paired, his observational powers less 

 dulled. Indeed, I have no hesitation in 

 saying, and in saying it I draw from many 

 yeai"s' experience, that a four years' college 

 course in the languages, literature and 

 mathematics is of positive injury to the 

 modern student of medicine. He has lost 

 valuable years, even as the musician has 

 lost them who begins his special studies at 

 twenty-two or twenty-three years of age, 

 lost them irrecoverably. Such a student 

 might make the good family doctor, whose 

 loss Dr. Draper deplores, but the chances 

 for the highest success in his profession 

 have been impaired. 



In some of the better medical colleges 

 the course of the would-be physician is 

 now marked out with more or less pre- 

 cision through six years from the high 

 school to the hospital, and it needs no 

 Iirdjjliet to say that what these schools are 



