THE FRESHMAN YEAR.

IN these days of progress, when the attention of the Faculty is especially directed to the different ways in which the standard of scholarship may be raised, there is one class of students whose interests are little considered, and who seem destined to be the scapegoats of every disagreeable required study which is discarded by the other classes. It is hardly necessary to explain that the class referred to are the Freshmen, and we are too well acquainted with the studies with which they are afflicted to make an enumeration necessary. There is, however, one characteristic of the Freshman curriculum which falls so heavily upon many students that its modification would be of great benefit.

We speak of the excessive representation of mathematics and science, a circumstance which causes the majority of Freshmen to waste much time over studies which to them are useless and repugnant, to the neglect of the classics, and other subjects which would be at once more congenial, more useful, and more improving. Freshmen should study mathematics without doubt, but it is manifestly unnecessary to force them to study four different kinds, besides mechanics and chemistry. The effect of this system is twofold: to make the Freshman year very disagreeable and expensive to those students who have not mathematical minds, and to fill the pockets of private tutors, who expect a large compensation for the disagreeableness of the occupation which they pursue. The excessive amount of mathematics required in the Freshman year is profitable alone to the tutors, who reap a rich harvest before every examination. The proof of what we say may be found in the number of students who are obliged to spend large sums of money in order to be put up to enough "points" to pass the examinations, and the absolute ignorance of the subject which they display a very short time after the examination is over.

This is not necessarily the result of neglect of work, but of the positive inability of many to master or appreciate the study of mathematics; and students who cannot solve knotty problems themselves are obliged to hire tutors to do it for them; thus the training of the mind, the stock argument in favor of mathematics, becomes applicable to the tutor who does the work, but has no effect upon the student for whom it is intended.

It is urged that the Freshman year should be a test of ability; but it should be a fair test. At present a great advantage is given to the students of mathematical propensities, and all others are made to pass through an ordeal which is unnecessarily and unfairly severe.