the smaller and more 1 emote institutions to retain or form associations with the work of the large universities. The professor from the large university may also gain by first-hand knowledge of educational conditions elsewhere. There is, however, a risk that we may by such means cultivate the i traits of the propagandist and exploiter; rather than those of the scholar. This is the danger to which the American professor is exposed and from which he has not escaped.
We may hope that the Harvard plan is the initiation of a larger movement which would be wholly beneficial. The colleges of each state should be allied with the state universities or with the private corporations standing in its place. There should be a free exchange of professors and students between all parts of the country. Then there should be a great national university at Washington or elsewhere frequented by advanced students and professors from all parts of the country and all parts of the world—men who would gladly learn and gladly teach. Harvard, Columbia and Chicago, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois may be secondary centers, but they should cooperate to establish a super-university, which would have the same relation to existing universities that these should hold to the colleges.
THE CAVENDISH LABORATORY OF CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY
Certain centers of research and scholarship are national and international in character. It seems that there would be advantages in greater division of labor, so that one subject or group of subjects would be especially favored at each university. To a certain extent this happens under existing conditions, for a department which is strong is likely to become stronger, while a weak department does not readily improve. But there are usually se%eral universities having departments of about equal strength in a given subject and graduate students find the leading men widely scattered. A large group of students and teachers working m the same field exerts an enormous influence.
A real world center of this character is the mathematical and physical work of Cambridge University, maintained since the time of Newton. The Cavendish Laboratory for experimental physics, established forty years ago, has had in its directors three men of remarkable distinction, Clerk-Maxwell, Lord Rayleigh and Sir J. J. Thomson having in succession filled the Cavendish professorship. At the end of 1909 Sir J. J. Thomson had completed twenty-five years of service and to commemorate a tenure of office so full of achievement his colleagues have prepared a volume giving a history of the Cavendish Laboratory, from which we borrow the facts and the pictures of this note. The book contains a series of chapters in which the Clerk-Maxwell period is reviewed by Professor Schuster, the Rayleigh period by Mr. Glazebrook, and the tenure of Professor Thomson by himself and a number of the former students of his laboratory, including Professor Rutherford. There is given a list of memoirs, containing an account of work done in this laboratory and a list of those who have carried out researches in it. They number more than two hundred, including distinguished investigators in all parts of the world.
The practical teaching of physics and laboratories equipped for research are of comparatively recent origin. At Paris, Oxford and London there were but modest beginnings, when the Duke of Devonshire, then chancellor of the University of Cambridge, gave about $40,000 for the erection of the Cavendish Laboratory completed in 1874. It was enlarged at a cost of $20,000 in 1896, and again in 1908, mainly through the gift of Lord Rayleigh of the greater part of the Nobel prize for physics awarded to him in 1904. According to American standards the investment in the building is modest, but
