THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



615 



a medical course which can not count 

 on any special knowledge on the part 

 of the student — it should in this case 

 be five years — and this must be fol- 

 lowed by a year or two in the hos- 

 pital. Students are on the average 

 over eighteen years old when they enter 

 Harvard, and the physician would not 

 begin to practise medicine and to learn 

 what can only be taught by practise 

 until he is nearly thirty. To this late 

 start in life there are serious objec- 

 tions both educational and economic. 



It may be that the local separation 

 of the medical school from the rest of 

 the university which obtains at Har- 

 vard and also elsewhere, as at Colum- 

 bia and the Johns Hopkins, may ulti- 

 mately lead to greater independence on 

 the part of the medical school. In 

 this country we find that medical 

 schools were usually started as inde- 

 pendent institutions which later be- 

 came parts of universities. This was 

 a great advance, for the medical 

 schools were largely proprietary insti- 

 tutions whose standards were lower 

 than in the university. But it is per- 

 haps now true that the spirit of schol- 

 arship and research is more advanced 

 in the medical school than in the col- 

 lege. When a medical school is suffi- 

 ciently well endowed and its professors 

 are men devoted to research, it is prob- 

 able that it would be best for it to 

 take charge of the education of stu- 

 dents after they leave the high school, 

 whether their period of instruction is 

 to be four years or ten. The re- 

 sources of the college and the graduate 

 schools could be fully used, but men 

 engaged in medical practise, teaching 

 and investigation should be responsible 

 for the education required by physi- 

 cians and by those preparing to under- 

 take research work in the medical 

 sciences. 



KAKICHI MITSUKURI, 1858-1909 



In Tokyo on September 16, after a 



long illness, died Kakichi Mitsukuri, 



professor of zoology in the Imperial 



University, dean of the college of sci- 



ence, and the foremost zoologist of 

 Japan. 



Any one might safely have predicted 

 that Mitsukuri would succeed. For he 

 came from stock which was both intel- 

 lectual and energetic. For generations 

 his family had produced prominent 

 scholars, especially physicians, and I 

 recall that one of his forefathers had 

 learned the Dutch language and was 

 translating works in surgery and an- 

 atomy in the days of the early Toku- 

 gawas, when such exotic studies were 

 punishable with death. And it came 

 to pass that this family with its tradi- 

 tion of western learning pushed to the 

 front in the enlightened upheaval of 

 the restoration. And that of its 

 youngest members Mitsukuri and two 

 of his brothers were among the schol- 

 ars who sought the training of foreign 

 universities. They were better by one 

 than par nohile fratrum, those young 

 Mitsukuri, and if they could have 

 looked from their ship into the waters 

 of the future they would have seen 

 themselves high in the counsels of a 

 new and national university, one of 

 them a dean of a college, another a 

 peer, a minister of education, and a 

 president of a university. 



Mitsukuri Kakichi, as he is known 

 in Japan, owed his training largely to 

 the United States. He received his first 

 foreign education in Hartford — he was 

 then but a boy and was in the care 

 of the Misses Goldthwaite, to whom 

 his gratitude was ever almost filial. In 

 1875 he entered the Sheffield Scientific 

 School, and took his degree of Ph.B. in 

 1879. The same year he matriculated 

 at Johns Hopkins and studied with 

 Brooks and Newell Martin for four 

 years. In 1881 he became fellow in 

 biology and he took his degree (Ph.D.) 

 in 1883. It may be mentioned that 

 his thesis " On the Gills of Nucula " 

 has not fallen into the limbo of for- 

 gotten dissertations. In his Hopkins 

 days he was an enthusiastic frequenter 

 of the Chesapeake laboratory, and was 

 an intimate of his fellow students, 

 Fessenden Clark, Sedgwick and Wilson. 



