part a German terminology to describe it, and for the first time we hear in an American institution of a faculty of philosphy in charge of graduate work. At the present time all the large universities maintain graduate departments of instruction, under, however, a varying descriptive title. Harvard, for instance, calls its non-professional graduate school the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; Yale uses the simple title, Graduate School, as do Princeton, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, and others; Columbia organizes its non-professional graduate - work under three separate faculties, political science, philosophy, and pure science, all, however, under a single administrative head, with common educational requirements. According to the last report of the Commissioner of Education of the United States there were in 1914, in the 567 universities, colleges and technological schools covered by the report, a total of 216,493 students. Of these, 13,094, of which 8,885 were men and 4,209 were women, were registered in the non-professional graduate schools.

The academic degrees bestowed in the graduate school are those of Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy. The Master of Arts degree is usually acquired at the end of one year's advanced work performed subsequent to the award of the Baccalaureate degree, altho in single instances two years are required. The degree of Doctor of Philosophy is usually bestowed on the basis of two years' residence work in the university; in actual practise, however, three years are requisite in the great majority of cases to complete the conditions of the award of the degree, and in not a few instances this period is prolonged, often for several years, before the candidate has satisfied all requirements, including the submission of the doctoral dissertation which necessarily embodies original research work and in some way is a contribution to existing knowledge. The work of the graduate school, accordingly, is intended to cover advanced instruction, upon which is based the award of the Master of Arts degree, and advanced instruction and research, upon which is based the award of the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy. The higher degree may, however, be secured without the other, which does not form a necessary preliminary, altho it is frequently taken en route, and in some conceivable cases can advantageously be taken without in any way disturbing the continuity of the work. In 1914, according to the last report of the Commissioner of Education, 2,533 degrees of Master of Arts were bestowed by American universities, 1680 of which went to men and 853 to women. In the same period 519 degrees of Doctor of Philosophy were bestowed, 446 on men and 73 on women students a total, accordingly, of 3,052 degrees for the nonprofessional work of the graduate schools. From the apparent emphasis that is here laid upon this matter of degrees in the graduate school it is not for a moment to be supposed that to confer degrees is the end and aim of graduate work in the university. That is not the case in any reputable institution of learning in the United States. The degrees earned by students in our universities are only the outward and visible sign of a certain kind and amount of work accomplished, and in the multiplicity of the various degrees that are bestowed, categorize, outwardly at least, the work that has been done. The intention of the graduate school is to give advanced instruction and to encourage research, not to award degrees. There may be at times degree hunters among the students-men and possibly women who prize the degree attained rather than its content-but even these have fulfilled the conditions of the award of the degree, and in them, too, there must have been left behind by the process some modicum, at least, of the leaven of educational righteousness.

What, then, if this is its organization and general intention, is the function of the graduate school in the university? The graduate school rests, as has been explained, upon the college, upon which it has in fact in almost every instance in its historical development been superimposed. The character of the instruction given in the graduate school depends, accordingly, largely upon the character of the instruction given in the college, and the students

who undertake this work in their intellectual equipment, their scholarly instinct and their habits of mind when they come to the graduate school bring with them the inheritance in an altogether preponderating degree of the college. The American college, consequently, is directly responsible to the graduate school for the material with which it has to work, and upon the college largely depends where the graduate work of the university shall begin, and what shall be its scope.

The intention of the American college is to give to its students the fundamental conditions of what is sometimes called a liberal education; in other words, its ideal aim is broadly cultural. It is intended in the scheme of education to furnish the necessary equipment of an educated man or woman, whatever shall be his subsequent place in the body politic. Many of its graduates go into the professional schools and thru them into the learned professions, law, medicine, architecture, engineering; some of them become the students of the graduate school. The great majority, however, go out directly into the active life of the community, and have, as a consequence, completed then and there, as such, their formal education. The college course is, accordingly, not alone the preparatory stage of the graduate school; it is, at the same time, and more and more with the development of a system of education, the preparatory stage of the professional schools of widely varying sorts, and it is the ultimate educational stage of an important part of the men and women of the nation. It is a difficult part to play in an educational system that still lacks a perfect correlation of its parts, and the question may pertinently be asked whether it plays it well.

The American college is preeminently that part of the system of education that, to use a figure of the time, is conspicuously on the firing line, and it has been often and at times harshly criticized for its deficiencies in fulfilling the educational ends that it is thought should be demanded of it. From the point of view of the non-professional school the charge that may broadly be made against the

college is its diffuseness. It teaches so many subjects that there may only too readily result a lack of concentration in any. It is, nevertheless, entirely possible to obtain in the college as it is organized in our better institutions, whether these are colleges alone or are parts of universities, an education that will serve as an excellent preparation for further work in the non-professional graduate school, and doubtless that is all that the graduate school can reasonably require. The real embarrassment arises, not from the lack of an adequate preparation for more advanced work on the part of the student who has received his training in a good college, but from the fact that not all of our colleges that bestow the Baccalaureate degree are equally good. In the absence of a national system of education that has standardized its various stages, the Association of American Universities, whose membership is made up of twenty-two of the important institutions of the country, has adopted the following definition of a college: "An institution to be ranked as a college must have a course of four full years in liberal arts and sciences, and should require for admission, not less than the usual four years of academic or high school preparation, or its equivalent, in addition to the preacademic or grammar school studies."

This, accordingly, is the assumed educational equipment of the student when he enters upon the work of the graduate school, and the material with which that school has to work. In spite of a preparation that apparently lacks homogeneity in purpose and result, the student comes to it with an education in a fair degree commensurate with a reasonable demand for intellectual preparedness; and the graduate school, however uneven from the nature of the American college its material may be, sets up in this way a standard of entrance that insures an approximately reasonable terminus a quo to the instruction.

By far the great majority of the students of the graduate schools are the one-year candidates for the degree of Master of Arts who have no intention of proceeding to the degree

of Doctor of Philosophy or to undertake research .work. Their desire is simply to extend the period of formal study by another year, but at the same time to narrow their work to a few subjects, which they may continue or begin as the case may be, under the more specialized conditions of graduate instruction. The task, accordingly, of the graduate school is largely to teach this body of advanced students and still to retain intact its ideals, which, above everything else, are not only to teach the content of knowledge already at hand, but to promote original research by practise in its particular methods and by stimulating in the mind of the student the desire to undertake it. The graduate school, on account of its material, is preeminently a great teaching school, and largely, no doubt, because of this fact it is an excellent teacher, in this respect far beyond the German university, where teaching, as such, in many subjects is not infrequently overlooked as a fundamental factor of the instruction that is left to the student himself to supply, but to an extent often beyond an intelligent ability to supply it. It is a wide-spread popular idea that the German university is a place of research alone, but that is far from being the case, and the instructors who conduct research work and themselves are engaged in it are also actively engaged in teaching. What is particularly characteristic of the German university is the spirit of research that pervades the whole; but it is customary, as it is necessary, to continue in the university along broad lines the subject teaching begun in the Gymnasium and to begin at the beginning of new subjects that the Gymnasium has not taught. The American university is not different from the German university in these respects; it only has a larger body of students who are to be taught along the more advanced lines of instruction, and fewer who are to take the necessary additional time for learning the methods of original investigation.

The subjects of instruction in the graduate schools of the greater universities in the United States cover liberally the whole vast extent of those subjects of human interest