Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/319

Ground Plan of the Buildings of Princeton University,
showing the situation of the Graduate College.

are both fine and possible. It is not desirable for students to sleep in dark closets and eat at cheap boardinghouses, or for professors to live in hidden little flats and wash the dishes. Beauty and dignity are as far removed from extravagant luxury as from squalor. Professor West justly says:

Three elements compose the graduate college. Foremost is a body of first rate professors, to be added to others now in the faculty, interesting men, scholars of high power, eminent in their subjects, and able to waken young men. Do we need to say this is the capital A in the alphabet? If so, let it be said again and underscored, because it would be absurd to say anything else. The second element is a company of students of high ability. . . . The third element is the buildings, the material home wherein this community shall find the realization of its desires.

He also writes:

The truth at the heart of this history is that a university is a community, and a community made up of teachers and learners, an actual respublica litteraria (to quote an old name for the University of Cambridge), and that in this established and continuing society lies the safety of learning as a self perpetuating force and the promise of learning as a usable force in the world.

 

FRANCIS GALTON

Francis Galton is now dead at the age of nearly eighty-nine years. One more of the great men who gave distinction to the Victorian era has been lost from the small surviving group which in science includes Hooker, now ninety-four years old, Wallace, eighty-nine years old, and Lister, eighty-four years old. In the generation a decade younger there are eminent men still living—Avebury, Rayleigh, Crookes, Roscoe. Geikie and other men of science—and perhaps Great Britain better than any other nation retains the fertility for the production of genius. It may indeed be that the men active in our own day are no less able than those of the nineteenth century; that remains for the next generation to decide. For us. however, these men—Darwin, Kelvin and the great company of leaders in science and letters of the Victorian era—are as giants whose stature we can not reach.

Galton published in 1909 a volume entitled "Memories of my Life," which gives a characteristic and charming account of his varied work and experiences. He was of Quaker descent,