President Eliot's Lecture Before the Graduate Club.

President Eliot delivered a decidedly interesting lecture last night to the members of the Harvard Gradu-Club on "Research and Publication as University Functions." Although this subject is relatively a new one, the president has given it his attention for a number of years.

Of necessity the main function of a university always has been, and must be, teaching. It is, in a word, to bring the most highly educated youths of the time up to the limits of education. But from this there spring other functions, among which the first is research. In all advanced subjects the teacher is continually attaining the limit of that subject, and is, therefore, eager to reach out a little beyond this attained knowledge. In turn such a teacher is surrounded by eager and enthusiastic men and is certain to attract them into the research that interests him.

Greatly stimulated by recent developments, research has almost become a universal test of professorship, for the teachers who do not stimulate their students to research are not likely to be successful in the lower parts of their subjects. especially in the scientific studies.

The second function is distinctly more complicated than the previous one, yet it is no less a test of a university's activity. Johns Hopkins was the first university to begin this thing and probably saw in it the means of making itself better known. From this beginning others have sprung until our own university publishes no less than eight papers, covering every variety of scientific and literary research.

There are, to be sure, objectionable features in this fuction of publication which may make it undesirable. Not-withstanding this, the faculty has under consideration, at present, a plan for the reconstruction of the departments of instruction in which we may find the needed restraints to the objectionable features of university publications.