Page:The study of history in Holland and Belgium (IA studyofhistoryin00frrich).pdf/19

 know that the Dutch doctor's degree is almost equivalent to our Belgian doctorat spécial. It is not only necessary to undergo oral examination before the assembled professors, which constitutes, entire, our examination for doctor of philosophy; but it is necessary, aside from this, to present a dissertation and to defend a certain number of theses. The preparation of this doctoral essay becomes, with good students, a serious scientific enterprise to which they often devote a couple of years and from which a book of the first order often follows. But this work is done under the direction of the professors with whom the future doctor is more particularly connected. Thus the master enters into direct intercourse with the student for many months, as initiator in scientific method and guide through the maze of bibliography and accumulated erudition.

At Leyden, Prof. Acquoy has found, from time to time, a pupil who, in his doctor's thesis, has uncovered a new point in the National religious history. Silenced in the Faculty of Arts, history has thus found an unlooked-for asylum with the theologians. It will therefore be interesting to study historical teaching in the Faculty of Theology as well as in that of Arts.

The university building at Leyden is a Gothic structure of red and white stone, formerly a nunnery. It is not large, but it does not lack charm and is picturesquely situated near an old bridge over a pretty canal, the Rapenburg, which is shaded on both banks by ancient trees. Entering the Academiegebouw one comes first to the imposing Aula, an old chapel, sparingly decorated in the most elegant style of the Dutch renaissance; then to the old staircase with its allegorical crayon-frescoes, religiously preserved, representing scenes in student life, the work of a Leyden man who is to-day a personage of note, M. de Stuers. On the second floor is the hall which contains a portrait of N,Villiam the Silent, founder of the university,