attendance of the preceding year, when the figures first rose beyond 4,000, as four years before, in 1901-1902, they first rose beyond 3,000.

The distribution of these students among the different courses is shown by the following table, which gives the corresponding figures for the preceding years since the opening of the twentieth century :

Besides II in the winter course in veterinary science.

Besides 30 in the summer term in entomology, 28 in the summer term in paleontology, and eighteen in the summer school in medicine in New York City.

¶ Besides eight in the winter course in veterinary science.

Besides 35 in the summer term in entomology, 12 in the summer term in paleontology, and 9 in the summer school in medicine in New York City.

** Besides three in the winter course in veterinary science. †† Besides one in the winter course in veterinary science.

Besides 33 in the summer term in entomology.

The records of Cornell University always carefully distinguish between students who, having passed the examinations for admission, pursue courses leading to degrees and attendants in short or special courses who enter without examination. Of these latter there are two groups, the Summer Session and the Winter School in Agriculture. Both are excluded from the following table, which takes account only of students regularly enrolled in courses leading to degrees during the academic year from September to June:

This table shows an increase in the attendance of regularly enrolled students of 62 over that of the preceding year. There was a gain of 43 in Arts and Sciences and of 41 in Civil Engineering, but there was a loss of 51 in Medicine (a course in which there was a general falling-off throughout the country) and of 15 in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering (which was undoubtedly due to a rigid

enforcement of the requirements for admission). The changes in other Colleges are unimportant.

HALLS FOR STUDENTS

For this student population, now numbering thousands, Cornell University has not a single hall of residence excepting the Sage College for women, which, with its annex, accommodates about half of the 411 women graduates and undergraduates enrolled in the University. While the intellectual and scholarly spirit and organization of the University are on a high plane, the social life leaves much to be desired. The great majority of the young men -all except those in fraternities-are scattered in boarding and lodging houses throughout the city, nor is it possible without halls of residence to organize them as social communities which shall foster and enjoy the habitual personal intercourse, the comradeship, the solidarity, the common consciousness which spring in the main from close and constant social contact due to living together under a common roof and sitting together at a common table. The experience of American students seems to show that the fraternity house, accommodating two or three dozen students, presents, in the matter of size and arrangement, an ideal for the residential hall: it is large enough for a community and not too large for intimate acquaintance and friendship; it provides studies, bedrooms, bath rooms, kitchen, dining room, and common rooms (the size and number of which might perhaps be reduced in houses owned by the University). Thirty of these houses would accommodate about 1,000 young men. The cost of building them would undoubtedly be greater than the cost of ten larger halls each accommodating one hundred students, with a separate dining hall, like the dormitories and halls of Harvard and Yale. But in this age of mechanism and bigness, it is

especially desirable that the universities should possess the most favorable conditions for the development of manhoodfor the moulding of man moral and social as well as of man intellectual. And such communities of 25 or 35 young men would, the President has come to believe, be more fruitful seed-p'ots of personality than the conventional dormitory with one or two hundred chambers, but no dining hall or common room. Either, however, would be a great improvement on the present condition at Cornell. But for either the University must await gifts from the friends of higher education. The experience of Harvard University shows that the endowments of the institution could not advantageously, or perhaps even safely, be invested in residential halls. And so the President repeats with new emphasis what he wrote a dozen years ago-in the Report for 1894-1895-when the University had only 1,689 students as against 4,225 in 1906-1907.

"After endowments for the establishment of chairs and departments, no gifts to the University could be more helpful than halls of residence or dormitories for students. This is a form of benefaction popular with philanthropists who have an honorable ambition to connect their names permanently with great institutions of learning. Nowhere

in America is there such a grand field for the gratification of this ambition as at Cornell University, where the first hall of residence is still to be erected. Built upon the campus, with no outlay for grounds, such buildings would yield, at a moderate rental, a handsome income, which might be turned into the general revenues of the University or designated, wholly or in part, to such special objectschairs for professors, scholarships for students, etc.—as the donor might be particularly desirous of promoting. The educational and social advantages to students living with their comrades under a common roof on the grounds of the

University have been mentioned in previous Reports, and the effects of halls of residence in developing sentiments of loyalty and affection to the University have been demonstrated by universal experience. The University of Pennsylvania, which has hitherto been without them, recently adopted a scheme for dormitories. And the friends of Cornell earnestly hope that she is not, in this respect, to lag much longer in the rear. In the absence of halls of residence owned by the University, Greek letter fraternities. have had a flourishing development at Cornell; but while in general they deserve encouragement, it must not be forgotten that they bring the University no income (though several of them are on the Campus), and that, in the competition for superior buildings and furniture, which a watchful eye may now begin to discern, they are liable to introduce into the University an element foreign to its comprehensive and democratic spirit and dangerous to its simple, earnest, and healthful life. Whatever tends to the establishment of distinctions-to the separation, locally or socially of the rich and the poor should be checked in its incipiency. There is no more healthful and promising corrective to those undesirable effects which the fraternities, in spite of all their best efforts and along with all their great advantages, may produce than a system of halls of residence. To be sure there is one danger to be guarded against, or the very halls would themselves become an evil. At Cornell University there should never be a "rich man's" dormitory or a "poor man's" dormitory. All halls of residence should be plain, substantial, and convenient buildings; and the students' rooms should not be further removed from the stringency of poverty than from the luxury of wealth. It is unnatural to disturb the free and generous intercourse of youth by reminders of artificial distinction; and it is little less than criminal for a university