Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/80

72 rank with, the German universities. We are handicapped by the college tradition of four years' education to fit a man for everything in general and nothing in particular. But the colleges are rapidly losing ground, and it seems to be only a question of time as to their total disappearance. I do not mean that they will cease to exist in name, but that a college (in the sense of the term as universally accepted thirty years ago) is an institution which will have no place in the American educational system of the future, just as it is unknown in the present educational system of Europe. In fact, our best colleges are passing through rapid revolutionary changes, and, like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and others, are becoming universities. Let it be our part to help the transformation, to hasten it, and to secure for research its place as the basis of the highest education in science. Every one admits that the value of a university depends chiefly upon its professors, but it is not understood that ability to give instruction six to ten hours a week successfully by no means qualifies a man to be a university professor. The essential qualifications for a professor of any natural science are, first, ability to carry on original research; second, ability to train others to carry on original research. AH other qualifications are subsidiary. Of university life research is the Alpha and research is the Omega.

We welcome the growth of the university idea in this country, and we can not gather in this place without speaking with grateful recognition of the services rendered to the cause of the highest education by the university whose guests we are to-day. The Johns Hopkins University has the glory of having been the first American institution to accept unreservedly the genuine university ideal. Would that she had had more imitators!

up the conclusions announced by Mr. Worthington O. Smith in his book, Man, the Primeval Savage, Dr. W. Boyd Dawkins agrees with the author in the opinion that man inhabited southeastern England after the Glacial period; also in the view that the preglacial or postglacial age of man is to be regarded as merely of local significance, because the Glacial period is a purely local phenomenon, not marked in the warmer southern lands, such as the Indian Peninsula, which was inhabited by the palæolithic hunter. "We know him in India simply as living in the Pleistocene age. He probably invaded Europe in the preglacial age, and lived in the south while Britain lay buried under a mass of glaciers, or was covered by a berg-laden sea. He is postglacial in the valley of the Thames. He is not separated from our own times either by a wall of ice the ice age of Prof. James Geikie or by the tumultuous waters of a vast deluge, such as that recently put before us by Sir Henry Howorth. He is separated by a geographical revolution during which the seaboard of northwestern Europe, as we find it now, came into being, and Britain became an island as well as by a change in our land from a continental to an insular climate."