chance to stimulate mental activity and to give training in the estimate of evidence and in inductive reasoning by means of experimental investigations, which offers itself in no other field than science, is too valuable to be lost. A mere course of lectures on science appeals to the same faculties as a course of lectures on any other subject; there is nothing peculiar or distinctive about it except the subject-matter. This of course is of great value to a student seeking to understand the world in which he lives. But science can do more than that for the student. It can acquaint him with. new methods of investigation and a new spirit of inquiry as well as with new principles and facts. The reorganization of elementary courses in science so that they may furnish to undergraduates who go no further the peculiar sort both of culture and training they are capable of yielding is the most pressing educational problem now confronting the science departments of Cornell University.

LEGAL AND MEDICAL EDUCATION

The College of Law has just completed the twentieth year of its existence, and the Medical College is entering upon the tenth. The former has extended the course of study from two to three years, and both have steadily raised the requirements for admission. Both now find themselves confronted with the problem whether in the future higher requirements for admission shall not be demanded than the high schools, whose graduates have hitherto been accepted, are able to satisfy.

It is a serious matter for a professional school to restrict its members to persons who have had some college training in the arts and sciences. But the motives and reasons for this improvement in the preparatory education of candidates are not only cogent in themselves but they gain additional force from the demonstration which each successive

year affords of the unsatisfactory results of the present arrangement. These results are prejudicial alike to the profession, to the student, and to medical and legal science. A college training in arts and sciences, when it is not baulked of its legitimate fruits, gives a man a range of ideas, a habit of reflection and reasoning, a training and mastery of faculties which, as it were, brings him into full and energetic possession of himself and all his powers. Deprived of this training a student of law or medicine, unless he be exceptionally endowed and self-educated, is not at home among the sciences which constitute the curriculum and cannot derive from them the full advantages they are intended and qualified to yield. Nor, of course, can these sciences be successfully cultivated by him, much less enriched or enlarged. Furthermore, he is pretty certain to be ignorant of literature, history, economics, and the like; to be untrained in logic and speculation; and even to lack the indispensable art of expressing himself easily and correctly either in speech or writing. Such men lower the tone of a so-called learned profession. Nor, except in rare and happy instances, can they ever expect to occupy its higher ranks.

These melancholy facts emphasize the need of a remedy. Yet the solution of the problem is far from simple. For it is the State which controls the practice of law and medicine, and no state either in America or indeed in the English-speaking world ever has required, or seems likely to require, a degree in the liberal arts or sciences as a prerequisite to the study or practice of law or medicine. The great majority of candidates will in all probability, therefore, continue to go to professional schools on the completion of a course in the high schools. And these candidates, from the point of view of the public, ought certainly to receive the best professional training they are capable of

assimilating. Nor does it admit of doubt that the professional school, which is an organic part of a university, is a better and more effective school than the isolated, unendowed, and often commercialized institution which it is generally displacing. It would seem to follow, therefore, that in the public interest there should always be universities whose professional schools are open to the graduates of high schools. Naturally the number of these will diminish in proportion as the public comes to make higher scholastic demands of their lawyers and physicians. But to this process of reform, even if the public sentiment should be more potently aroused and insistent than it is at all reasonable to expect, economic forces will set limits. For the fees which the public of the smaller cities, the villages, and the rural districts will be able to pay their lawyers and physicians will always be small, so that young men who look forward to this field of practice, if they have not means (as few of them have), would not feel justified either in borrowing or taking time to earn the money necessary to obtain a liberal education in arts or science prior to entering upon their professional courses. And these men constitute the great majority of the professions. Add to them the rank and file of the lawyers and physicians of the great cities, whom the same economic considerations will deter from securing a superior preliminary education, and it at once becomes obvious that, if all the universities of the country should demand a degree in arts or science for admission to their schools of law or medicine, as two or three have already done, they would divorce themselves almost completely from the professions which it is their desire and their duty to serve. On the other hand there should be special schools for the men who are to go to the top in both professions whether as practitioners or as scientists and scholars. And since there is no way of testing native

endowments, educational attainments seem to furnish the only criterion for the differentiation contemplated.

At present there are three schools of law and two schools of medicine in the United States which are open only to college graduates. The number might perhaps be somewhat increased without prejudice to the public, especially in the case of professional schools located in large cities where college graduates abound and where the professions offer their greatest rewards. Hitherto all other professional schools have been open to students whose preliminary education did not exceed, and was often less than, that furnished by a full high school course.

A change, however, has now taken place. In law two years of college work or its equivalent is now required, or, according to announcement made, will soon be required at the Universities of North Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Yale, and at Trinity College, North Carolina. At the meeting in August, 1907 of the Association of American Law Schools the propriety of exacting such an entrance requirement as a condition of membership in the Association was referred to a committee for consideration, with instruction to report next year, when the question will doubtless be decided by the Association. The report of the Committee on Legal Education of the American Bar Association, presented at the meeting in Portland, August 27th, 1907, contained the following recommendation, the consideration of which for lack of time was deferred until next year:

Resolved, That, in approving a high school education as a minimum requirement in general education, the American Bar Association is not to be understood as holding the opinion that such education is fully adequate to the needs of those who are to practice law. On the contrary the Association entertains the opinion that the interests of the profession and of the State would be promoted if all candidates for admission to the Bar should be required to have an education equivalent at least to two years of a college course.

Still more radical has been the departure in medical education. In 1906 only seven medical colleges in the country required one or more years in a college of arts for admission. During the past year the Council on Medical Education of the American Medical Association exerted its influence toward the adoption of a higher standard. There are now fifty medical colleges which either already require one or more preliminary years in a college of liberal arts or have voted to require this preliminary preparation by January 1st, 1910. Of these fifty colleges two are requiring a degree and eighteen others will require two or more years of college work, while thirty will require one year.

In view of these facts, and with constant regard to the public interest as well as to scholastic ideals and institutional prestige, it may now be asked what Cornell University should do with its Colleges of Law and Medicine.

In answering this question, each institution must be considered separately, if for no other reason than this, that the one is located in Ithaca which has a populatian of 13,000 and the other in the City of New York which has a population of more than 4,000,000 within the city limits and more than 5,500,000 within a radius of thirty miles.

In the College of Law there were last year enrolled 211 students, of whom 149 came from New York State and 62 from outside the State. Besides these, 25 students from other Colleges of the University registered for certain courses. Of the 211 law students II were college graduates and 46 others had taken one or more years of college work. This latter class has been increasing in numbers for several years. In other words law students themselves, without prescription by the Faculty, are coming more and more to recognize the value of an education in the liberal arts and sciences prior to the pursuit of professional study. This disposition has been encouraged by the Faculty, who have