director in sympathetic touch with educational thought. These questions are becoming the more insistent, in proportion as our universities are adopting a policy in accordance with which the professional student of music is obliged to meet requirements of a general academic nature, as well as those of an exclusively musical nature. It is, indeed, necessary, in a university, to have a prominent composer, as well as a prominent musical educator; but the latter should be the administrator and director—unless, perchance, that rara avis can be found, a man both composer and educator.

The man that can accomplish most for the future of American music is the one that combines university training, esthetic temperament, and educational as well as artistic inclination, if he occupy, as a forum, the chair of music in some prominent institution. Such a man will not only be a leader in developing music education, to the enrichment of our national life and the development of the art of music; he will also exert an influence on educational thought in general, so that music education shall bear its part in determining the ideals and methods of the future. The destiny of music education involves not only its adaptation to the general body of educational thought, but also a reactive process by virtue of which our educational systems shall themselves be transformed and vitalized.

This, then, is the mission of music in colleges and universities to assist in the development of our future art, to stimulate and improve our national systems of education, to spread culture, to uplift our American civilization, to afford another fulcrum on which Archimedes may rest his lever and raise the world.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

LEONARD B. McWHOOD

IV

THE COLLEGE LIBRARY

The world's spiritual record and its physical record are not unlike in their manner of preservation and presentation. Scattered traces on the surface or near the surface of the earth stand representatively for constructive forms of action, which went forward for long periods over wide areas. These simple facts, still bearing testimony to framing power, become sources of inference under which a conjectural method is shaped covering the world's physical history. This process is sound in the measure in which the visible facts are wisely regarded and wisely united with each other.

In like manner the libraries of the world contain a variety of spiritual experiences, which, tho scattered much at random among men, still safely stand for processes of thought and feeling and action that have taken part in human life. The histories of mankind are not thus very different in their method of construction from the theories of geology. They are good or bad, adequate or inadequate, in the measure in which they give true interpretation and extension to the actual products of the human mind. It is these that are real and are waiting for a rendering which shall fill all gaps and give full significance to the several parts. A recognition of this principle, that we reach safely the invisible by an extended study of the visible, has led to a use of libraries distinct from that which at first prevailed. The reader, at the suggestion of another or from his own limited knowledge, called for a book and it was furnished him. The volumes with which it was associated remained hidden and their concurrent lessons were not learned nor their corrections received. The safety of the books was more thought of than the instruction of the student. More frequently at the present time he is left to find his way among the shelves, and the volumes that remain as well as

those which are taken win attention, impress themselves upon the mind, and fill it with a sense of the wide activity which, in one way or another, has found play among men in the direction his own thought is now pursuing. The library has thus come to be used and studied as one whole, and to stand to the student as a medium of reaching the men and the times. that have gone before him. This method, even in its weak beginnings, is one of investigation, and comes at length to lay open human life. Thus the college library in the use of books has come to accept direct and extended contact as the chief service which it can render. The student no longer regards it as a cold, cheerless crypt from which a few bones are occasionally handed him, but as a well-furnished museum, as suggestive of living things as of dead ones, and where all experiences, reaching into his own life, stand in orderly relation to each other.

College libraries are midway between those large collections which nourish the labors of a few and those popular collections which provide more for pleasure than for toil. The college library is intended to meet the wants of those who are being awakened to the magnitude of the world, and are anxious to find their way among facts which are still a confused medley. Direct and extended contact with books is becoming the universal college method, and promises ultimately to wear away the indifference, distaste, and ignorance which lie in the path of the beginner. Those thefts and abuses which go with open-handed use are after all best overcome by the larger gratification and more general interest which accompany the present method.

There is, however, one custom, growing up with this extended use of books, which tends to put upon it a new limitation, and to arrest it in its own direction. The library is broken up and divided into seminars, more or less remote from it, according to the topics and departments embraced in different courses of study. Thus philosophy, civics, art, and the various branches of science have each their own center of study, while the general collection loses both value and interest. There is closer contact with sources of instruction, but at the same time a much restricted field.

This division of the main library has obvious advantages, but serious disadvantages. It gives apparent opportunities to the departments concerned, and a more cozy, comfortable, and companionable enjoyment of them. Those in charge of the instruction have the pleasure of magnifying it, and rendering its prosperity more visible. It multiplies divisions, excites emulation, and gains a show of independence. The students feel the force of this self-assertion and are drawn to the department and to the work assigned them.

On the other hand, it weakens the general library and leaves on its shelves the books least current and of least obvious utility. It becomes a storehouse of odds and ends of volumes apparently out of date, while the living books and living interests have gathered at a half-dozen new centers. It occasions uncertainty as to where a book is to be found, makes the pursuit of it annoying, and prevents easy reference. Not only are the books of special quality to be had only at a given seminar, those of varied and wide-reaching contents wander off subject to conflicting claims. These difficulties may be reduced by duplicating copies, but are not likely to be overcome. The cost of housing books, the cost of attendance, and the educational impression of a varied and large establishment all suffer somewhat by this dispersion of effort.

Yet these are not the reasons which should chiefly determine the policy of a college. There are deeper and more important considerations. The unity of college life, already too much broken up, is still farther sacrificed by this divided attention. The unity of college life finds both expression in and nourishment at the general library. On the whole, our American method is fortunate in having a college training of suitable. length and distinction interposed between elementary and professional instruction. It is a concession definitely made to budding manhood, a recognition and assumption of its opportunities which mark it as a distinct transition, a possible era in the hastening changes which sweep us onward. College life does not allow itself to be overshadowed or reduced in value by what precedes it or follows it. It stands by itself as a period of awakened enthusiasm, of wide observation and

redundant life, in which new impulses may spring up and assert control. Such a period ought not, in the name of education, to be reduced or lightly treated. The mind of the young man, coming for the first time in wide contact with the world, and yet not jostled by it, should be left for a little to contemplate its magnitude, apprehend its variety, and shape itself to its labors. Let the boat hug the banks of the beautiful river on which it is launched, float slowly onward occupied with restricted interests, and only at intervals feel the force of the midstream currents, which will quickly enough draw it in and engage it with rocks and rapids which make all other objects nugatory. It may seem wisdom to hasten the conflict, but it is not the same wisdom as that which widens knowledge, sobers the mind, seasons the muscles, and leads one to pursue rational ends rationally.

These seminars are only another phase of that process by which college life is broken into shreds, beaten into felt, and used as a wrapping for a single pursuit. Colleges have improved in variety of studies, in thoroness of instruction and in a close hold, backward and forward, on the continuity of life. But this tendency can easily go too far, and has gone too far at more than one point. We owe much to contemplation, we owe much to manhood; we need to put forth our best and most habitual efforts in the direction of assured strength and integrity. I recall an excellent woman who wished an apple tree in front of a window at which she was often engaged. She also desired that it should not obscure the view. She steadily stript away, in its stages of growth, all laterals, hoping that it would adopt the habit of a palm with its foliage at the very top. It refused the suggestion, bent back to the ground with its terminal tuft, too limber even for a whip. We must do something for the bole of the tree, the trunk that is to sustain its branches, and spread them in the sunlight.

When I was in college, appliances were very limited, instruction poor and commonplace, but these distressing facts did not destroy the value of four years; they hardly reduced it. The unity was great; the action and reaction between