Page:Carnegie Flexner Report.djvu/96

78 "abundantly illustrated," or at St. Louis University, where sixty-four hours of didactic instruction are devoted to the subject."

After all, however, there are different ways of meeting even a desperate condition; and in this instance the variations are within limits amazingly wide. There are schools that sink ignominiously without a struggle; others that take advantage of the student's plight to palm off cheap instruction at a profit; and a small number that by valiant effort minimize, and to no slight degree surmount, the difficulty. According as an institution reacts in one or another of these ways, we make out three main varieties among schools on the high school basis:

1. Those that by careful selection of students and extraordinary pains in teaching make the very most of the situation;

2. Those that, content to operate on a lower plane, are still commercially effective;

3. Those that are frankly mercenary.

We shall briefly consider these three types in succession.

(1) These schools form a small minority. They are straining hard to get from the high school to the college basis; in equipment, organization, and scientific spirit they are to greater or less degree already there. They have usually four scientific departments, already in most instances well equipped, each in charge of a full-time professor, for whom private quarters and more or less free time procure some opportunity to push ahead. Energy, sincerity, and intelligence are abundantly in evidence throughout these institutions. In resources they vary greatly, but in spirit they are alike; and all are admirable. Every possible point is scored: the more difficult the contest, the keener the play. However scant the resources, something is put into books; however hard pressed the instructor, a museum, carefully catalogued and labeled, has been painfully assembled.

Of schools of this type, two Canadian institutions—McGill and Toronto—deserve especial attention. In point of laboratory equipment they equal Minnesota and Michigan; their lower entrance requirement, minimized by conscientious adherence to a strict interpretation of their announced standards, is now compensated by the addition of a fifth year to the curriculum. At Toronto the teaching is wholly in