The Popular Science Monthly writes to the editor to the effect that certain college teachers have professed to be able to find a personal application in the article in question. It has been charged that the picture of "our college" represents a certain trans-Mississipi institution, and that, concealed in the article, are various allusions to particular persons connected therewith. In order to correct this very serious misconception, the writer desires to make the following statement:
The institution referred to as "our college" is purely imaginary, or to speak more correctly, it is a composite picture intended to represent the typical American small college. It is doubtless true that the adherents of any particular college can find in the description details which fit their institution. Were this not the case the article would fail of its purpose as a composite portrait of all the colleges; but it will be found impossible to fit the entire description to any particular college, and it certainly was no particular college that the writer had in mind.
In his description of the size of the college, its faculty, the town in which it is located, its buildings, etc., the writer spoke entirely at random, and tried to picture what may fairly be regarded as average conditions. Since the resulting criticism has been brought to his attention, he has tried to fit the description to a particular college, but without success. He finds, however, that there are some three or four middle-west colleges which, if dismembered and patched together again in the proper pattern might make an institution which would fit pretty well for "our college." The description of the conditions in "our college" are, he believes, typical of the American small college, taking the best with the worst and averaging them, and he has arrived at this conclusion after wide reading in which the valuable reports of the Carnegie Foundation have not been neglected. The reference to the innocuous professor whose beautiful character compensated for the absence of scholarship was intended to represent a not unfamiliar type (at least in some of the older colleges) though the writer will plead guilty to being strongly reminded, while writing it, of the former incumbent of the chair of Latin in a certain eastern college. The incident of the professor who was criticized by one of the trustees for "inefficiency" because he staid at home and attended to his business, was related to the writer about ten years ago, and concerns a college which, so far as he is concerned, shall remain nameless. Suffice it to say that, so far as he has yet learned, nobody has suspected that the article refers in any way to that particular college. The writer does not even know the names of the principals in the case. These few instances will indicate the imaginary and composite character of "our college." It was represented as being on the Carnegie Foundation lest the foundation colleges, reading the article, point their finger at the outside institutions and say: "This is intended for you!" The evils incident to what the writer regards as a defective system of college organization affect the foundation colleges equally with the others, though the standard of the foundation colleges of course averages much higher. In fact these evils are not unknown in the universities, but there the problem is much complicated by other factors, and should for that reason be separately considered.
Least of all was it the intention to utter any criticism either on the president or trustees of the small college. The description of the president of "our college" is not a portrait, and the same is true of the trustees. Trustees, president and faculty, are alike victims of what the writer believes to be a defective system, and of the three the president is perhaps most to be pitied. Too i often does he find himself in the position of being ground between the upper and the nether millstone. The trustees, as the writer knows them in more than one college, are high-minded, disinterested men, serving without recompense and often with a high degree of self-sacrifice. If anything was made clear in the article in question it was this: that any criticism either of president or trustees was directed not at individuals but at a system which demands impossible tasks of both.
SCIENTIFIC ITEMS
We regret to record the deaths of Dr. George William Hill, distinguished for his contributions to mathematical astronomy; of Dr. Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce, known for his work in logic and mathematics; of Professor Newton Horace Winchell, formerly state geologist of Minnesota, and of Professor Eduard Suess, the eminent Austrian geologist.
