Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/483

Rh in the history of veterinary science in this country. Among the most valuable results of veterinary work at the university have been the introduction in this country of some of the successful practices of foreign veterinarians in regard to the suppression of diseases among animals and their transmission to men. In this connection the most noted achievement has been the introduction of tuberculin as a diagnostic for detecting tuberculosis in cattle. The valuable and well-known experiments of Dr. E. O. Shakespeare on infectious diseases of swine, and on tetanus, were also conducted at the veterinary department of the university.

The university has taken a new departure in order to make its treasures of art and science accessible to the people. Systematic Saturday courses were opened in the college two years ago for teachers unable to take the regular graduate work of the university. These courses have become so popular that one hundred and eighty-one teachers are now doing special work in the various departments. Estimating that each teacher represents forty pupils, the university, by means of these special courses, exerts a direct influence on more than seven thousand individuals. Dr. Edward Brooks, Superintendent of the Schools of Philadelphia, stated recently that the city school principals in Dr. Fullerton's graduate class alone represented twenty-five thousand pupils. This is but one step toward giving to the general public a share in university instruction, too often restricted to a few. With free museums, new laboratories and new methods, and more liberal encouragement from the State, the university is rapidly approaching the ideal expressed by Prof. Calvin Thomas:

A university in the German sense is an institution crowning the educational system of a state, treating its students as free adults engaged in a hona-fide pursuit of knowledge, offering its advantages at the lowest possible price, sending down its roots into the life of the people, to take thence the sap of its own vitality, and paying back the debt by raising the level of intelligence and adding to the value and dignity of life throughout the entire Commonwealth.

Provost Harrison's great influence with the people of Philadelphia, with his own generosity, has resulted in gifts to the university during the past two years of one and a half million dollars. University instruction, from its very nature, can not be self-supporting, for universities are, after all, charities on a large scale. The recognition which the university is now obtaining from the city gives us every reason to believe that the efforts of the provost will make it possible for us, within the next few years, to do for the educational life of the community, in an adequate degree, what a university as a center of higher culture should do, and at the same time to make large contributions to the sum of human knowledge.