ble hypothesis, there will be no Americans left to be contaminated by their language; if they are defeated, the less we have to do with a race that has brought upon the world the greatest tragedy of all times the better will we be pleased. Let us weigh these facts sanely and let us decide that modern civilization has no need of the products of a people who are the Huns of modern times. ELIZABETH, N. J. H. MILES GORDY COOPERATIVE PURCHASING FOR COLLEGES1 The colleges of the country are beginning to feel the pinch of the world war. Income is decreased and the unit cost of every item consumed has steadily increased for many months. Many necessary items have become so scarce that their market price is fixt by the conditions surrounding each sale. The price of a given commodity will often vary more than one hundred per cent in the same city on the same day. Many unscrupulous dealers have deliberately taken advantage of the situation. The most distressing feature of this condition is that it is the smaller college with limited funds who can least afford it, that often pays the fancy prices. The many instances of unreasonable cost, and the many requests for specific information have led to the conviction that there should be some central organization to assist the colleges to secure the right materials at the right price. Any plan which will centralize the buying of any group of institutions will yield handsome profits, thru the lowered unit cost, and stabilizing of credits, but the greatest saving would result from the intelligent standardization of materials. The annual waste thru the purchase of illy adapted materials, at too high costs, added to the sum of lost discounts, would pay operating expenses for many days. The following instances are selected at random: Read at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges, at Chicago, Ill., January 11, 1918. 1. A well-known institution consumed three dozen mop wringers per year at an annual cost of $90.00. Last year they consumed eleven wringers at $4.00 each. The unit cost is 60 per cent higher, but the total annual cost is less than half. 2. One of the best cleaning soaps I know of comes in a paste form. The old plan was to give every janitor a pail of soap whenever he wanted it. He put a handful of soap in the mop pail and kept the floors clean. We found, however, that over half the soap did not dissolve but was thrown out with the dirty water. He now gets the soap in liquid form. 3. The boilers in a certain power plant were kept clean with a boiler compound costing 30 c. per pound. A similar equipment in the next block used compound costing 10 c. per pound. 4. The wooden floors of a State Street store lasted only a few months because they were mopped with sal soda and water. The sodium united with the potash in the wood leaving a dry, lifeless floor that soon disintegrated. 5. A beautiful marble floor was slowly dissolved by being cleaned with a strong potash soap. 6. The Pullman Car Company and the National Government buy sheets and pillow slips on specifications describing minutely the composition and texture of each thread and the number of threads to the square inch. How does your institution buy them? The Pullman Company saves some three inches on every sheet by using a narrow hem while most of the colleges still use the wide hems. 7. The dishes in many college kitchens are today being washed with lye. This lye unites with the grease on the dishes and produces a soap of unsurpast nastiness which clings to the dishes. The first cost is low but the health risk is great. 8. Another institution washes the dishes with the soap gotten in exchange for kitchen grease. The cost is low but the soap is made from the decaying carcasses of dogs and horses. 9. One college uses carbon paper costing $3.00 per hundred while another pays fifty cents per hundred. 10. Sixteen-inch bristle brooms cost one college $40.00 a dozen while another uses near-bristle at $15.00 a dozen. Both are grossly extravagant in dollars and cents. 11. I find that examination books are supplied at various colleges for 5 c. each-2 X 5, 3 X 5 and 4 × 5. 12. Millions of envelopes are consumed by our colleges each year which have been printed one at a time on a Gordon press at about a dollar a thousand. These could be printed better for less than one-fourth the cost before the paper was made into envelopes. This applies to letter heads as well. 13. I find one hundred different institutions using forty different kinds of cleaning powders at a cost ranging from 3 c. to 10 c. per pound. 14. A few weeks ago the head of the laboratories in a state institution wrote that the work of the institution was hampered by the high cost of alcohol which had gradually mounted to $7.50 per gallon. He filed a bond with the Internal Revenue Department and reduced his cost to less than $1.50. This institution had been paying $300.00 a barrel too much for alcohol. I find that while the instructors' salaries are fixt with great accuracy, and the materials used in the laboratories are selected with care, the materials used in the Operating Department of the great majority of institutions are selected by persons of limited experience, who cut and try until they find something that seems to fit. Some of them never do find anything that fits. While the head of the institution is lying awake nights trying to make the income cover the budget the dollars are trickling away thru the waste in operating supplies which are bought at too high a cost, and are not fitted for the use to which they are put. This money belongs to the people and should be spent for the education of the students and not for the experiments of our head janitors. Let us confine our experiments to the laboratories. Instead of placing three hundred separate orders for carbolic acid with three hundred firms at three hundred different prices, let us place one order with the man who makes it. Instead of buying washed cheese cloth dusters at thirty-five cents a pound, let us take those old window shades and dicarded maps, wash them ourselves and produce the same dusters at a fraction of the cost. Instead of buying a fancy disinfecting spray for the laboratories at a dollar and a half a gallon, let us use bleaching powder and water at ten cents a gallon. It will do the job much better. The colleges of this country should have a central office manned by experts on materials, their uses and their costs, that would serve as a clearing house for information. This office should be gradually developed into a central bureau of purchases for college supplies. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO JOHN C. DINSMORE How Children Learn. By VII REVIEWS FRANK N. FREEMAN. Boston. Houghton, 322 p. $1.60. Mifflin Company, 1917. There are two classes of teachers of education and writers of educational textbooks. The first, the earliest in the field and still the more numerous, are decidedly vague in their knowledge, yet pompous in their claims of "knowing it all," laud the methods of teaching far more than the material to be taught, and for the most part merit the scorn which they receive from their colleagues on the faculty. As writers, they are all-inclusive in their scope, cover up lack of accurate knowledge by sweeping, dogmatic statements, revel in superlatives, and produce a type of textbook worth little when published and worthless a few years later. It is this class chiefly that has brought upon teachers of education the much-discust criticisms in The Unpopular Review and the vituperations of Professor Shorey. The second class is composed of educational experts, men who look upon teaching as a science which may be studied as exactly as any laws of psychology and the principles of administration that bring about successful schools; as writers, these men, unfortunately still few in number, produce books that are eminently practical and scientific, based on knowledge, not hearsay, produced only after extensive laboratory work and experimentation. Professor Freeman's new book, like his earlier volumes, certainly belongs to this second class. In that realm of vagaries how to learn and how to teach-he presents facts and rules that may be practically applied. This book is in reality a textbook in applied psychology, particularly for grade school teachers; in the words of the editor, it is to reveal "to teachers and students how all effective instruction of children must be founded on the |