partment of philosophy has been dismissed because his family relations are not approved. It is not alleged that he is immoral, and it is admitted that he is a good teacher and an able investigator, but his conduct and opinions are said to be subversive of the family. Whatever may be the merits of the case, the administrative methods do not show to advantage.
In the new state of Oklahoma "the best constitution in the world" has not provided an ideal educational system. Indeed the conditions approach opera bouffe too nearly to be taken quite seriously. The head of the state university, the heads of the normal schools and of other institutions have been dismissed and supplanted by southern democrats. At the university the question appears to be not whether a professor is an able teacher and investigator, but whether he is a good southern methodist and democrat, who does not dance. Such conditions are transient. The danger is that methods which can not be approved in politics and business may obtain such footing in our universities that they will no longer be centers of democratic individualism and of intellectual and moral leadership.
THE BOYDEN DEPARTMENT OF THE HARVARD COLLEGE OBSERVATORY
Uriah A. Boyden, a Boston inventor and engineer who died in 1879, bequeathed property valued at over $230,000 for "the establishment and maintenance of an astronomical observatory on some mountain peak at such an elevation as to be free, so far as practicable, from the impediments to accurate observations which occur in the observatories now existing, owing to atmospheric influences." The fund was transferred by the trustees named in the will to the Harvard College Observatory, which carried out the provisions by the establishment of the Arequippa Observatory in Peru. An illustrated account of this mountain observatory and of the researches that have been undertaken there was contributed to a recent volume of the Monthly by the director, Professor Solon I. Bailey. Prior to the foundation of the Arequippa Observatory in 1891, several expeditions were sent out to determine the conditions that would best fulfil the terms of Mr. Boyden's will, and an account of this preliminary work has just been published in "The Annals of the Harvard College
