AmbJe°cUri?2iarm' }   Pharmacy  and  Pre-Medical  Schools.  831 
sonal  opinion,  but  I  wish  to  point  out  that  the  differentiation  of  a 
purely  cultural  subject  rests  primarily  upon  the  fact  that  it  has  no 
immediately  apparent  usefulness  in  assisting  a  man's  professional  ac- 
tivities. Whether  a  subject  is  a  cultural  one  or  a  utilitarian  one 
depends  very  largely  upon  what  the  student's  future  career  is  to 
be ;  for  example,  a  knowledge  of  trigonometry  is  of  no  immediate  ad- 
vantage to  a  practicing  physician  but  is  essential  to  the  engineer;  to 
the  one  it  is  a  matter  of  general  educational  interest,  to  the  other  it 
means  bread  and  butter.  To  the  business  man  Grecian  history  is 
purely  an  ornamental  acquirement  but  to  the  artist  it  is  almost  a 
professional  requisite. 
"While  some  of  you  may  differ,  the  subjects  which  seem  to  me 
pre-eminently  suitable  as  educational  ornaments  for  the  physician  are 
rhetoric  and  history.  I  also  believe  that  he  should  be  well  grounded 
in  at  least  two  foreign  languages,  one  ancient  and  one  modern,  and 
that  a  knowledge  of  higher  mathematics,  as  trigonometry  and  cal- 
culus, is  valuable.  I  do  not  wish  to  infer  that  other  subjects  such 
as  geology,  psychology  and  botany  may  not  be  of  value  as  educational 
embellishments  but  they  are  rather  too  closely  related  to  the  profes- 
sional subjects  to  be  considered  as  purely  ornamental. 
It  is  very  manifest  that  the  ordinary  two-year  course  in  phar- 
macy is  so  hopelessly  deficient  in  these  branches  that  it  lies  outside  of 
all  comparison  with  the  academic  institutions.  There  has  recently 
been,  however,  a  strongly  manifest  tendency  on  the  part  of  colleges 
of  pharmacy  to  enlarge  the  scope  of  their  work,  and  a  number  of 
them  have  instituted  courses  covering  four  years  of  study  and  leading 
to  a  degree  of  Bachelor  of  Science  in  Pharmacy.  In  these  institu- 
tions are  being  offered,  although  not  in  so  abundant  variety  as  in  the 
academic  colleges,  courses  covering  the  more  essential  topics  of  a 
liberal  education  such  as  English,  French,  German  and  mathematics. 
The  third  reason  for  requiring  a  collegiate  education  is  that 
there  are  certain  branches  fundamental  to  the  medical  sciences,  which 
are  no  longer  taught  in  medical  schools,  which  are  essential  to  un- 
derstanding of  the  medical  subjects.  For  example,  it  is  manifestly 
impossible  for  a  student  to  follow  the  course  in  physiological  chem- 
istry, which  is  usually  given  in  the  first  year  of  medical  curriculum, 
unless  he  has  an  acquaintance  with  general  chemistry. 
That  this  is  the  most  important  reason  for  pre-medical  train- 
ing is  shown  by  the  fact  that  a  knowledge  of  the  same  fundamental 
branches  is  required,  not  only  by  the  Council  on  Education  of  the 
