Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/98

94 members of the Harvard medical faculty. The thanks of all men of science are due to the architects, Messrs. Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge.

Professor Minot proposed the 'unit system' and Professor Porter the arrangement of two wings with a common lecture-room and library. The unit adopted for the laboratories is 23 x 30 feet, accommodating 24 students. Each unit has three windows and can be subdivided into two or three rooms. The smaller rooms for individual research are also divided into mezzoninemezzanine [sic] storeys. The windows extend to the ceilings, giving abundant light, and the architectural effects are in some measure due to the piers of pilasters between the windows. The buildings can be extended by adding new units, and would finally form courts.

The arrangement of the buildings is shown in the illustration and by the ground plan. The administration building contains offices, common-rooms, lecture-rooms and the Warren Museum with an area of 22,000 square feet. The laboratories are for anatomy and histology, physiology and physiological chemistry, pharmacology and hygiene and bacteriology and pathology, each pair having a common amphitheater and library. The arrangements for heating, ventilation, refrigerating, etc., are very complete.

The large cost of these buildings appears to be justified, as the money was given for them and might be charged to the city of Boston and the people of the country as well as to medical education. It is said that the gray marble added only three per cent, to the cost. The buildings do not, however, provide for clinical work, and as there are altogether only 287 students in the school, the rent to be charged to each student is in the neighborhood of $.500. The number of students will, however, increase. The need of four similar amphitheaters, each seating 265 students is not clear. They may be built for the future, but the future may show the futility of lecturing to large audiences of medical students. Here the unit system seems to be lacking where it was especially needed. Still less evident is the desirability of four separate libraries which will apparently be both expensive and inconvenient. But the fundamental criticism which must be made is the permanent separation of the medical school from the rest of the university. It appears to the present writer that Harvard has done great harm to itself and to education by 'segregating both in time and space the work in medical science. It requires the bachelor's degree for entrance to the medical school, whereas if the sciences preliminary to medicine were carried on at the college, the liberal studies would become less aimless and the professional studies more liberal. The separation of liberal studies, professional work and research does injury to each.

Phi Beta Kappa address given by Mr. Charles Francis Adams at Columbia University has been printed in the daily papers of more than one city, with abundant editorial comment and letters from correspondents. This means that the address was concerned with an interesting problem or, at all events, attacked a problem in an interesting way. Mr. Adams is alleged to have said when engaged in writing a book upon Puritan life, "I never have been so happy as during the last year; I have been destroying people's ideals." At all events he confesses in the present address to 'a decided lack of faith in ideals.' The iconoclasm is entertaining, and it may be profitable, but apart from the characteristically personal form of expression it is not new. Neither is the remedy new though it is claimed as such in Touchstone's words: 'An ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own.'

Mr. Adams became academically famous in 1883 by another Phi Beta Kappa address on 'The College Fetich,'