a medical course which can not count on any special knowledge on the part of the student—it should in this case be five years—and this must be followed by a year or two in the hospital. Students are on the average over eighteen years old when they enter Harvard, and the physician would not begin to practise medicine and to learn what can only be taught by practise until he is nearly thirty. To this late start in life there are serious objections both educational and economic.
It may be that the local separation of the medical school from the rest of the university which obtains at Harvard and also elsewhere, as at Columbia and the Johns Hopkins, may ultimately lead to greater independence on the part of the medical school. In this country we find that medical schools were usually started as independent institutions which later became parts of universities. This was a great advance, for the medical schools were largely proprietary institutions whose standards were lower than in the university. But it is perhaps now true that the spirit of scholarship and research is more advanced in the medical school than in the college. When a medical school is sufficiently well endowed and its professors are men devoted to research, it is probable that it would be best for it to take charge of the education of students after they leave the high school, whether their period of instruction is to be four years or ten. The resources of the college and the graduate schools could be fully used, but men engaged in medical practise, teaching and investigation should be responsible for the education required by physicians and by those preparing to undertake research work in the medical sciences.
KAKICHI MITSUKURI, 1858-1909
In Tokyo on September 16, after a long illness, died Kakichi Mitsukuri, professor of zoology in the Imperial University, dean of the college of science, and the foremost zoologist of Japan.
Any one might safely have predicted that Mitsukuri would succeed. For he came from stock which was both intellectual and energetic. For generations his family had produced prominent scholars, especially physicians, and I recall that one of his forefathers had learned the Dutch language and was translating works in surgery and anatomy in the days of the early Tokugawas, when such exotic studies were punishable with death. And it came to pass that this family with its tradition of western learning pushed to the front in the enlightened upheaval of the restoration. And that of its youngest members Mitsukuri and two of his brothers were among the scholars who sought the training of foreign universities. They were better by one than par nobile fratrum, those young Mitsukuri, and if they could have looked from their ship into the waters of the future they would have seen themselves high in the counsels of a new and national university, one of them a dean of a college, another a peer, a minister of education, and a president of a university.
Mitsukuri Kakichi, as he is known in Japan, owed his training largely to the United States. He received his first foreign education in Hartford—he was then but a boy and was in the care of the Misses Goldthwaite, to whom his gratitude was ever almost filial. In 1875 he entered the Sheffield Scientific School, and took his degree of Ph.B. in 1879. The same year he matriculated at Johns Hopkins and studied with Brooks and Newell Martin for four years. In 1881 he became fellow in biology and he took his degree (Ph.D.) in 1883. It may be mentioned that his thesis "On the Gills of Nucula" has not fallen into the limbo of forgotten dissertations. In his Hopkins days he was an enthusiastic frequenter of the Chesapeake laboratory, and was an intimate of his fellow students, Fessenden Clark, Sedgwick and Wilson.
