PRESIDENT LOWELL'S ANNUAL REPORT

To the Board of Overseers:

The President of the University has the honor to submit the following report for the academic year 1911-12:

Changes in Teaching Staff.

Since the last report was written the vacancy in the Corporation, caused by the death of Judge Francis Cabot Lowell on March 6, 1911, has been filled by the election of Robert Bacon, who relinquished his post as Ambassador to France to serve the University. He had hardly taken his place when another was left empty by the death of November 4, 1912, of Dr. Arthur Tracy Cabot, one of the most faithful and sagacious counsellors that we have ever had. Eminent as a surgeon, he had retired from his large practice a year before to give the rest of his life to public service; and we had looked forward to many years of co-operation and companionship with him.

The losses suffered in the instructing staff during the year covered by this report have been unusually heavy. Professor William Watson Goodwin died on June 15, 1912. Although on the retired list since 1901, and in declining health for the three last years, his name was an honor to the University, and the memory of his long service and great scholarship will not cease to be cherished. On July 30, Dr. Maurice Howe Richardson, Moseley Professor of Surgery, died suddenly in the full tide of his extraordinary activity. His devotion to the interests of the Medical School was constant, and he won the affection of vast numbers of patients in his private and hospital practice. Charles Robert Sanger, Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Chemical Laboratory, died after a prolonged illness on February 25th. His death thinned grievously the depleted ranks of the chemical staff. On April 7th died Abbott Lawrence Rotch, Professor of Meteorology, who founded and maintained at his own expense the Observatory at Blue Hill, which he devised to the University. A Pioneer in a new field of science, his presence cannot soon be replaced. At the close of the year Charles Loring Jackson, Erving Professor of Chemistry, retired, after a distinguished service of forty-four years as teacher and investigator; Arthur Searle, Phillips Professor of Astronomy, retired also, after devoting to the Observatory forty-three years; William Morris Davis, whose name is as well known abroad as in Cambridge, resigned the Sturgis-Hooper Professorship of Geology; and George Santayana, Professor of Philosophy, to our regret preferred in middle life to return to Europe. The Medical School lost through resignation three of its most eminent clinical professors: Dr. Frederick Cheever Shattuck, Jackson Professor of Clinical Medicine; Dr. James Jackson Putnam, Professor of Diseases of the Nervous System; and Dr. Edward Hickling Bradford, Professor of Orthopedic Surgery. The last of these was happily prevailed upon to accept the position of Dean of the School, in place of Dr. Henry Asbury Christian, who was obliged to resign because his professorship and his new duties as physician-in-chief of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital will fill all his time. Dr. Christian's work as Dean, in bringing about closer relations between the Medical School and the various hospitals, will mark an epoch in the progress of the School.

The new appointments made in the staff of the Medical School in consequence of these vacancies will be referred to in describing the condition of the School. The appointments and promotions to professorships in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences have been as follows:

Irving Babbitt, Professor of French Literature.

Reginald Aldworth Daly, Sturgis-Hooper Professor of Geology.

William Scott Ferguson, Professor of Ancient History.

Elmer Peter Kohler, Professor of Chemistry.

Arthur Michael, Professor of Organic Chemistry.

William Bennett Munro, Professor of Municipal Government.

Charles Palache, Professor of Mineralogy.

Walter Raymond Spalding, Associate Professor of Music.

Jay Backus Woodworth, Associate Professor of Geology.

Charles Henry Conrad Wright, Associate Professor of the French Language and Literature.

Although not strictly within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the promotion of Solon Irving Bailey to the Phillips Professorship of Astronomy may be mentioned here.

The New Plan of Admission.

In the last annual report figures were presented concerning the number and geographical distribution of students admitted to Harvard College under the old and new methods of examination. In the second year of its trial the new method has been used more freely, and the proportion of candidates who failed, although larger than under the old method, was much less than at the first experiment,--perhaps because the nature of the test was better understood and fewer boys tried it merely on the chance that it would prove easy to pass. The number of candidates under the new plan and the percentage of failures for the two years have been as follows:   1911  1912 Applicants,  185  259 Records not approved,  46  46 Admitted,  83==59.7%  154==72.3% Rejected,  56==40.3%  59==27.7%

Under the old plan in 1911 17.1 per cent of the candidates were rejected, and 8.1 per cent did not reappear to complete their examinations in September; in 1912, 19.1 per cent were rejected, and 6.1 per cent failed to reappear.

The distribution of the students admitted by the new method--geographically, and as between public and private schools,--does not differ much from last year, save that private preparatory schools in Massachusetts have begun to make some use of the new plan. Since it gives them greater freedom in their curricula, they are likely to resort to it more in the future. The following table shows the distribution for the two years by percentages:   1911  1912   Old Plan  New Plan  Old Plan  New Plan Public Schools,  45.7  80.5  41.8  79 Private and endowed schools,  54.2  19.4  58.1  20.9 Schools in Massachusetts,  72  41  72.7  42.2 Schools in New England,  85  47  87.1  51.2 Schools in other Atlantic States,  8.5  31  8.1  28.5 Schools west of the Alleghenies,  4.5  21  3.8  19.4

The results of the examinations will be found in greater detail in the report of the Chairman of the Committee on Admission.

That the new examinations are a good test of fitness for college work would seem clear from the records in their first year of the students recruited thereby, as shown in the report of the Dean of Harvard College. The proportion of low grades among the seventy-nine Freshmen who entered in this way in 1911 is much less, and the proportion of high grades decidedly larger, than for the average of the class. These young men have proved that they are qualified to pursue college studies; and, whether they could have passed all the examinations required under the old plan or not, they are admitted without conditions. The result is that of the 598 men who were admitted by examination and actually entered the Freshman class in 1912, 402, or more than two-thirds, entered clear. That is a great advantage both to them and to the College, for conditions are an additional burden upon students who ought to devote all their scholastic energy to college work. They are a heavy drag upon the Freshman year. Borne chiefly by the weakest, or least well equipped, they hold these men back and slow down the pace of the whole class.

Choices for Concentration.

The report for last year contained also a table showing the number of Freshmen who had chosen each of the fields of study for the concentration of their college work. The choices made by the Freshmen last May were not very different; but for that very reason, as showing a tendency rather than accident, a comparison of the two years is not without interest. The principal changes are increases in the actual numbers concentrating in Classics, English, Comparative Literature, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Philosophy; and a slight relative decrease in the number in the group of History, Economics, and Government.

CHOICES OF SUBJECTS OF CONCENTRATION.   Class  Class   of  of Subjects  1914  1915 The Classics,  12  22 English,  42  74 Romance Languages,  45  39 Germanic Languages,  9  14 Comparative Literature,  3  12 History and Literature,  9  4 Fine Arts,  12  14 Music,  9  6 Architecture,  6 Too vaguely expressed as Modern Languages,  9 Total, Group I,  156  185 Engineering,  55  43 Chemistry,  38  72 Biology,  14  12 Geology,  5  4 Physics,  4  7 Anthropology,  1 Special Combinations,    3 Too vaguely expressed as Natural Sciences,  2 Total, Group II,  119  141 Economics,  133  132 History,  41  50 Government,  25  33 Anthropology,    2 Too vaguely expressed as History and Political Sciences,  33 Total, Group III,  232  217 Mathematics,  9  21 Philosophy,  3  9 Total, Group IV,  12  30

PERCENTAGES OF CONCENTRATION. Language, Literature, Fine Arts, and Music,  30%  32% Natural Sciences,  23%  25% Economics, History, Government,  45%  38% Mathematics and Philosophy,  2%  5%

A few men have been allowed for good reasons to change their field of concentration, but they are not numerous enough to have a material effect upon the percentage. These tables indicate the main subjects of the students' work, but we must remember that they by no means express either the range of studies pursued by the individual student or the amount of instruction given by the several departments, for every undergraduate is obliged to distribute six of his courses among the groups in which his main work does not lie, and he may use his four free courses in the same way.

Oral Examinations.

The oral examinations in French and German, which went into effect for the Class of 1914, required that no student should be registered as a Junior unless he could read one of those languages with fair ease and accuracy. The examinations were held three or four times a year; and the result, as stated in the last annual report, has been that each time about one half of the applicants failed. But the student may work on the language and try until he passes; and the upshot illustrates the general experience that students will rise to any reasonable standard which is seriously required; for by the end of October, 1912, only thirty-three members of the Class of 1914 had failed to pass the examination. Thus the object of the rule has been in large measure attained--that of ensuring among the upper classmen an ability to use books in at least one foreign language.

General Examinations.

In the last annual report the adoption of general examinations in the Medical School, as a substitute for, or supplement to, the passing of a series of separate courses was described, and it was stated that the subject was under consideration in the Divinity School also. A general examination of this character has now been adopted for the degree of Bachelor of Divinity, and for that of Master of Divinity. The latter is a new degree conferred after a year of study, and designed to replace so far as possible the degree of Master of Arts hitherto conferred upon graduate students in the School by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The regulations for these general examinations in the Divinity School, and for the courses of study leading thereto, are printed in an appendix to this report.

The same principle has been discussed in Harvard College. After a year of careful study, the Division of History and Political Science,--comprising the Departments of History, Economics, and Government,--formulated a plan for a general examination before graduation of students concentrating in these subjects. The plan, which was brought before the Faculty this autumn, was adopted after debate in three meetings, and has since been approved by the governing boards. It lays down briefly the general principles, and, together with the outline of this plan prepared by the Division, will be found in a second appendix to this report.

In describing the general examinations for the Medical School something was said of the principle on which they are based; but the subject merits fuller treatment, because it involves a more radical change in American educational practice than anything the University has done for many years. It means a change not so much in machinery as in object; not of methods alone, but of the point of view. So far as I am aware, general examinations of some kind exist in all European universities, except for a degree with a mere pass in Scotland and the provincial universities of England. They have been used in the past in American colleges. In a very crude form they were at one time prescribed for graduation from Harvard; and in some other colleges they lasted until after the middle of the last century. Since the curriculum of those colleges comprised many subjects, the examination, which covered them all, was open to the criticism now heard of the general examination for graduation from the German Gymnasium. It was almost of necessity a review of unconnected studies; an effort of memory, preceded by a strenuous cram. But whether in such a test the disadvantages outweigh the benefits or not, it was quite inapplicable after the elective system had been adopted in a thorough-going form at Harvard and more or less completely by other colleges. The student being allowed to select as he pleased among all the courses of instruction offered by the Faculty, a general examination would have covered a different ground for each student; would have been merely a repetition of the examinations in separate courses which the student had already passed; and could not have required reading outside of the courses, or demanded a correlation of information obtained in courses in diverse fields. But now that every student is obliged to take six courses in some one field, the situation has changed, and the way is open for this valuable instrument of education in that field. To the courses distributed among other subjects it is still inapplicable; but in the field of the student's concentration his attention can be directed, as it should be, to the subject pursued, rather than to the particular courses taken, which then become not ends in themselves but only efficient means to an end. By examinations well devised for the purpose the student can be made to reflect upon the subject as a whole, correlating the several parts; and the interest of an intelligent man follows his efforts. Moreover, he can be induced to read books outside the strict limits of his courses in order to fill in the gaps; for the habit of independent reading has fallen sadly out of use among undergraduates at the present day.

Drawbacks of Plan.

A general examination has drawbacks as well as merits. If it tends to fix attention on a subject wider than any single course, it tends also to make the passing of that examination the goal, and to lessen interest in matters unlikely to appear there; and hence, unskillfully used, it may lead to the cramming of information by expert tutors without serious effort to master the subject. But if skillfully used, it may be made a powerful instrument for promoting co-ordination of knowledge, a broad comprehension of the subject, a grasp of underlying principles instead of memory of detached facts, and in some subjects may provide an incentive to intellectual effort such as no other type of examination can offer.

The benefits to be gained from a general examination are not needed equally in all fields of learning. In some subjects, like Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry, every advanced course must require familiarity with the principles taught in the more elementary ones, so that an examination in the higher branches measures fairly well the command of the whole subject. In other departments, notably History, there is little natural sequence, and a student may in his Senior year pass an excellent examination in a course on Europe in the nineteenth century although he has completely forgotten the American history he studied as a Sophomore,--and yet the events on the two sides of the Atlantic are intimately related parts of one movement in human progress. The general examination may well be applied, therefore, in one field while it is not in another; and the Faculty has been wise in allowing one division to adopt the plan without requiring uniformity in all.

If the general examination stood alone, the optimism of many undergraduates would lead them to postpone preparation until the time drew near, and then it would be too late. This could be justified only on the assumption that the function of the College was limited to providing earnest men with opportunities for education, probably with the result, witnessed in the German universities, that a large part of the students would make no attempt to obtain or earn a degree. No one would advocate such a plan for undergraduates here. American colleges must strive to form character, to induce habits of diligence; and they must do so all the more because, unlike the German universities, they are not groups of professional schools with the stimulus of direct preparation for one's career in life. It is not proposed, therefore, to abandon examinations in the several courses except so far as they occur at the same time as the general examination. Moreover, if the student is expected to study a subject, to regard his courses as means rather than ends, to do some outside reading, he must have special guidance beyond that which is provided in the courses he takes. There must be tutors, not unlike those at the English universities, who confer with the students frequently, not about their work in courses alone, but also about their outside reading and their preparation for the final test that lies before them. Tutors of this kind are an integral and necessary factor in the plan. To provide them will require money, part of which has been promised, while the rest must be sought from friends of the College; and the benefit to the students is well worth the expense involved. The great advantage for the average student of a general examination upon his principal field of study, lies in forcing him to correlate what he has studied, to keep it in mind as a body of connected learning, to fill in gaps by reading, to appreciate that all true education must be in great part self-education, a personal effort to advance on the difficult path of knowledge, not a half-reluctant transportation through college in perambulators pushed by instructors.

No one in close touch with American education has failed to deplore the lack among the mass of undergraduates of keen interest in their studies, the small regard for scholarly attainment; and a general examination upon a field of concentration seems to offer the most promising means of improvement. It was the method adopted in England a hundred years ago. The class tests at Oxford based on general public examinations began in 1802, and five years later they were divided into the Honour Schools of Literae Humaniores and Mathematics and Physics. The Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge began in 1747, the Civil Law Classes in 1815, the Classical Tripos in 1824. The other triposes at Cambridge and Honour Schools at Oxford were established at various dates after the middle of the nineteenth century. The effect in stimulating interest in scholarship and respect for high rank was rapid, profound, and permanent. Success in the examinations has been universally accepted as a test of ability and a gateway to the careers entered by Oxford and Cambridge men. The failure of American undergraduates, and, following their lead, of the American public at large, to value excellence in college scholarship is due in part, as the students themselves declare, to the fact that rank in courses depends upon the varying standards maintained by different instructors. It is due also to a sincere doubt whether one who can accumulate the largest number of high marks in short stretches of work is really the ablest man. Much must be ascribed, moreover, to the absence of competition on a large scale. So long as college men are all trading separate paths, crossing at many points but never leading to a common goal there can be little of that conviction of superior qualities which attached to the man who succeeds in achieving what many others are striving for. A well-ordered general examination avoids all of these imperfections, for it provides a uniform standard, a competitive test and a run long enough to call out the whole power of the man. The stimulus is not only good for those who hope to win high distinction, but will tend also to leaven the whole mass.

Control of Athletics.

To turn from studies to athletics is to leave a region where competition has been neglected for one where it has been carried to an extreme by the students themselves. The prevailing interest in athletic sports has done much for so-briefly and cleanliness of life in college, but the vast scale of the public games has brought its problems. They have long ceased to be an undergraduate diversion, managed entirely by the students, and maintained by their subscriptions. They have become great spectacles supported by the sale of tickets to thousands of people; while experience has proved that skilful coaching will determine the victory between teams of approximately equal strength. The result has been an enormous growth in expenditure until the authorities have felt compelled to take part in supervising it. The experiment of control by an Athletic Committee composed of three members of the Faculty and three graduates appointed by the Governing Boards, and three undergraduates selected by the captains of the teams, has brought improvement. Extravagence has been curtailed; but, with a revenue of about two hundred thousand dollars a year, money comes easily and is easily spend under the spur of intense public interest in the result of the major contests, and a little laxity quickly leads to grave abuse. Extravagance still exists and vigilant supervision is required to reduce it. Graduates, who form public opinion on these matters, must realize that intercollegiate victories are not the most important objects of college education. Nor must they forget the need of physical training for the mass of students by neglecting to encourage the efforts recently made to cultivate healthful sports among men who have no prospect of playing on the college teams.

Freshman Dormitories.

The promotion of a better college life, physical, intellectual and moral, has received much attention of late among men engaged in education. At Harvard we believe that a vital matter is to launch the student aright on the new freedom of college life by means of Freshman dormitories; and it is a pleasure to state that enough money has been subscribed to build three out of the four buildings projected. These three will house over four hundred and fifty students, or by far the greater part of the present Freshman class that does not live at home. One of them will be paid for by the bequest of the late George Smith, left to the College many years ago to accumulate until it reached the sum required to build a group of three dormitories of the collective size of one of the quadrangles designed. Another has been generously given by Mrs. Russell Sage, and at her reqpest will be named Standish Hall. The third is provided by a large number of subscriptions from alumni and others. The project will not be complete until the fourth is given, but the erection of the first three will be begun early in the coming year, as soon as the working plans, now progressing rapidly, have been completed. One of the quadrangles will be on Boylston street, behind the Power House, while the others will be built farther to the east along the parkway as far as De Wolf street. Their buildings will stand on three sides of quadrangles, the fourth side facing the river being open to the south. The architect, Mr. Charles A. Coolidge, has adapted to the purpose with great skill the colonial style of the older buildings in the College Yard.

People not very familiar with the progress of the plan have expressed a fear that the Freshmen would be treated like boys at boarding school; but that would defeat the very object in view, of teaching them to use sensibly the large liberty of college life. Liberty is taught to young men not by regulations, but by its exercise in a proper environment. The vital matter is the atmosphere and the traditions in which the youth is placed on entering college. At present he is too much enchained in a narrow set of friends who copy one another, not always wisely, and come too little into contact with the broadening influences of the college community as a whole. Hence he fails to see how much he can get out of college life, or finds it out too late to reap the full benefit thereof. The Seniors show their appreciation of all this by rooming together in the Yard, but they end where they should have begun.

Graduate School of Applied Science.

In the School of Applied Science important changes have taken place during the year. A number of technical courses have been removed from the list open to undergraduates, carrying forward the design of placing the School on a graduate basis. At the same time the plan of instruction has been modified and made more intensive in method, so that a college graduate without technical preparation can be taught his Engineering, Mining, or Architecture in the shortest possible period. No doubt it will take time for the community to learn that a man who hopes to rise high in his profession gains in the end by a college education preceding his technical studies. Engineering ought to stand among the liberal professions which are enriched by a general education, and in fact the number of college men who enter engineering schools, though still small, is increasing year by year.

The organization of the School has also been altered. At the suggestion of the instructors, the departments have been formed into Schools of Engineering, of Mining and Metallurgy, of Architecture and so forth, each under a Council of instructors, the whole being grouped under a new and distinct Faculty of Applied Science. This has the double advantage of giving the Schools a more strictly professional tone under the government of a body devoted wholly to their interests, and of relieving the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of questions hardly germane to its regular work. The new organization nominally went into effect in September, 1912, but in fact the Faculty of Applied Science began its services in the year covered by this report, and its members are glad to work out their common problems in a meeting of this kind.

The Graduate Schools of Applied Science possess an admirable staff of professors, and already in some directions excellent equipment, but as yet few students, for the reputation in the profession which fills the classes is naturally of slow growth. It cannot be stimulated rapidly, and depends upon the achievements of the men that the institution has produced. These are the principal means of recruiting fresh students for any school, and years must always pass before their influence in the community is strongly felt.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Since the last report was written the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has decided, at the request of great numbers of our fellow citizens, to erect its new buildings in Cambridge, and this brings home to us the question whether some co-operation between the two institutions is not possible in the training of students who are graduates of colleges or technical schools. That would not trench upon the principal field of the Institute of Technology, while it would add greatly in the efficiency of training college graduates, to whose needs the curriculum provided for boys coming from high schools is imperfectly adapted. The number of such college graduates is, and for an indefinite time to come will be, far too small to justify two separate schools; and that is even more true of the men who, after finishing the regular technical course, want to pursue advanced work. To maintain two distinct plants, fully staffed and equipped, for the teaching of an insufficient number of students in the most expensive of all kinds of education is not only a waste of educational resources, but entails an even more pitiful loss of efficiency. The momentum obtained by a combined effort would be far greater than that of two separate schools striving singly for the same object. No plan of co-operation has been devised, but the difficulties ought not to be insuperable if approached with mutual good will and a sense that an educational institution does not exist solely for its own glory, but as a means to a larger end.

The Law School.

Some comment was aroused by the decline in the number of students in the Law School at the opening of the term of October, 1912; but this is due, as the Dean explains in his report, not to the size of the entering class, which is substantially as large as ever, but to raising the standard for continuing in the School in the case of men whose work has been defective. Since the School has grown larger it has become both possible and necessary to insist on thoroughly satisfactory work by all students who attend the classes and who by their very presence affect the standard. The number of graduates of Harvard College who enter the School has, indeed, fallen of late years; but, this, as the elaborate report of the National Bureau of Education on the occupation of college graduates shows, is part of a general movement which is felt most promptly at Harvard. To inquire into its causes would not be possible here. It is enough to point out that the occupations in which college men engage have enlarged greatly, and the attractions of business life have grown stronger. The report of the Bureau, with its diagrams of historic changes in the proportion of graduates following different vocations, is highly interesting.

Graduate School of Medicine.

The year has been marked in the Medical School by the appointment of two new deans. That of Dr. Bradford as Dean of the School has already been mentioned. The other office is new. For many years courses of instruction, both clinical and in the laboratories, have been offered for the benefit of physicians and surgeons in active practice. A large part of these have been included in the Medical Summer School, while others have been given in term-time. The science and art of medicine are advancing so rapidly that many practitioners are glad of opportunities to gain a greater familiarity with recent methods than they can get from medical journals alone; and the Faculty felt that instruction of this character could profitably be made more systematic. A Graduate School of Medicine has, therefore, been created, with a separate dean and administrative board, and to some extent an additional staff of instructors, although not a distinct Faculty. Dr. Horace David Arnold has been appointed Dean; and the School opened its courses in October, 1912, with a very promising registration.

Hospitals.

Reference has been made on a preceding page and in former reports to the closer relations between the Medical School and the different hospitals. The central factor in the movement is the alliance with the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, situated opposite the main entrance to the School. The buildings are nearly completed, and will be ready for the first patients in a few weeks. In accordance with the arrangement for a joint selection of the staff of the Hospital and instructors in the School. Dr. Christian, our Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine, is the Physician-in-Chief of the Hospital, and Dr. Harvey Cushing, formerly of Johns Hopkins University, is Surgeon-in-Chief and has taken his chair as Moseley Professor of Surgery at the School. The other members of the staff have been selected by mutual understanding.

Notable also in the history of the School have been the opening of the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital for Cancer in close co-operation with the School, and the calling for the first time of a non-resident to a chair in the School and a leading position on the staff of the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. David Linn Edsall, formerly of the University of Pennsylvania and later of Washington University at St. Louis, was appointed chief of one of the two continuous medical services at the Hospital and Jackson Professor of Clinical Medicine in the School. The only other appointment to a full professorship has been the promotion of George Gray Scars to Clinical Professor of Medicine.

Medical School Discoveries.

The year has been remarkable for a series of contributions to medical science made at the School. During the summer and autumn of 1912 Dr. Folin published his discoveries in metabolism, which made a profound impression, and his analysis of the blood in cases of rheumatism and gout; Dr. Mallory, his discovery of the germ of whooping cough; while Dr. Rosenau, with the co-operation of Dr. Richardson of the State Board of Health and Professor Wheeler of the Bussey Institution, ascertained that infantile paralysis was transmitted through a species of stable fly (Stomoxys calcitrans). Enlarging the bounds of knowledge is a function of a university no less essential than imparting it; and in one field are the two more closely connected today than in medicine. Three such discoveries in the course of a single year are, therefore, a deep source of gratification.

Exchange Professorships.

During the year we have been fortunate in our exchange professors, both in those we have received and those we have sent forth. From France came Dr. Charles Dichl, Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Paris; from Germany Dr. Willy Kuekenthal, Professor of Zoology and Director of the Zoological Institute at the University of Breslau. To Berlin we sent Professor Theobald Smith of the Medical School, and to Paris Professor William Morris Davis of the Geological Department. The alliance whereby we are to send annually a member of our staff to lecture for a month at each of four Western colleges, Knox, Beloit, Grinnell, and Colorado, was inaugurated during the second half of the year by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart. Instructors were sent to Harvard by two only of these colleges. They were Walter Houghton Freeman, Instructor in Greek at Grinnell, who acted as Assistant in Greek here; and Elijah Clarence Hill, Head Professor of Romance Languages and Literature of Colorado, who gave an independent course in Spanish-American poetry.

Widener Memorial Library.

The University as a whole rejoices in the munificent offer of a new library building by Mrs. George D. Widener. Gore Hall has long been lamentably insufficient to contain the books on its catalogue. Many thousands of them, in yearly increasing numbers, have been stored in the basements of other buildings, while Gore Hall itself has been far too crowded for a proper use even of the volumes on its shelves. Among the precious lives lost on the "Titanic" was that of Harry Elkins Widener of the class of 1907, a rare collector of rare books. His collection, comprising many editions of great value and interest, he left to his mother, with a request to give it to Harvard when there was a building suitable for the purpose. But Gore Hall was not fireproof, and Mrs. Widener, in view of the conditions, generously determined to build a complete university library on the general interior plan worked out by our committee of architects a year ago, with additional rooms for her son's books in a part of the open court in the centre of the building. These rooms and the volumes they contain are to be under the charge of a special librarian selected by Mrs. Widener, who gives also a fund of $150,000 to care for, and at her discretion to enlarge, the collection. The other parts of the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library will form the four sides of a quadrangle, whereof the northern side, with the main entrance, will cover very nearly the site of the present Gore Hall, and the south front will be about one hundred feet from Massachusetts avenue. The building will contain one large and several smaller reading rooms on the North, and rooms for seminars on the upper floor; while the greater part of the eastern, western and southern sections will be occupied by the stack, in which, however, there will be provided working rooms for professors and a large number of tables separated by glass screens for other readers. Such an arrangement is designed to make the stack as convenient of access as possible to the scholars who use it, so that they may work with all their tools at hand.

Housing our books where they would be safe and could be used during the construction of the new building was no easy problem. It has been solved partly by turning Upper and Lower Massachusetts into reading-rooms; partly by the hospitality of Andover Theological Seminary, which has kindly allowed us to use any vacant space on its shelves; partly by sending appropriate books to various departmental libraries; but chiefly by transferring the students' dining-tables from Randall Hall to Foxcroft, and building temporary stacks for four hundred thousand volumes in the Hall, one of the few fireproof buildings we possess. Although the transfer of the books was made in term-time, it was carried out by Professor Coolidge, the Director of the Library, with such skill that there has been almost no interruption in their use.

Coolidge Memorial Laboratory.

Another important gift of a building has been that of a chemical laboratory by the Hon. T. Jefferson Coolidge in memory of his son, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, Jr., of the class of 1884. This building will be nearly of the same size as the Wolcott Gibbs Laboratory, and will be used for quantitative analysis. It faces Divinity avenue, and will form part of the proposed, and sorely needed, group of chemical laboratories between that avenue and Oxford street. Work upon it had been carried on as rapidly as possible, with the result that by the end of the year 1912 the outer walls were built and the timbers of the root were laid, ensuring its readiness for use before the opening of the next college year.

Other Gifts.

Of the other gifts received the largest have been: that of Mrs. Sage for the Freshman Dormitory; $100,000 from the class of 1887 on its twenty-fifth anniversary; $125,000 from Mr. Edmund Cogswell Converse to found a professorship of Banking in the School of Business Administration; $100,000 from Mrs. Collis P. Huntington for the construction of the Cancer Hospital; $74,285.71 from the estate of Mrs. William O. Moseley for travelling fellowships in the Medical School; $50,000 from the estate of Miss Harrlet E. Goodnow to keep poor students in Harvard College; $50,000 from Mr. George R. Agassiz for the use of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. These and many other benefactions are described more fully in the report of the Treasurer.

Pressing Needs of University.

Recipients of such generosity seem churlish in asking for more, but our needs are ever outrunning out resources, and one of the objects of the annual report is to point them out. There is still a deficit in the University, College and Library account, although for the year 1911-12 it was reduced to $14,750.40. Until it disappears we cannot expect an expansion of those departments that are undermanned, and still less any increase in salaries. That the incomes of professors are inadequate in view of the grade of talent required is generally admitted, and the constant rise in prices has been reducing their purchasing power year by year. One of the most pressing needs is more laboratories for instruction and research in Chemistry, perhaps the most promsing field for scientific investigation and one in which our equipment is still singularly insufficient. Another is an endowment for the Dental School, the imperative need of which was urged in the last report with a reference to the great services rendered to the public by the operating rooms and the sacrifices of the clinical instructors. Still another is the endowment of professorships in the School of Business Administration. One such, in Banking, has been founded as already stated by the generosity of Mr. Converse, but three more are required, and efforts are being made to raise the funds by subscriptions. Every professional school has meant the substitution of thorough instruction in the principles of an art for the slower and less comprehensive process of learning them by apprenticeship; and this School is based on a belief that the principles governing business organization and methods, which have been wrought out in practice by the labor of a generation of expert administrators, can be taught in a way to save the time of the student and make him more efficient. No new professional school, moreover, demonstrates its full value swiftly, and we need not be surprised that most of the students in our School still think a single year of its training sufficient. That the School, however, has already won recognition of its usefulness is proved by the rapid increase in the number of men entering it. During the first few years the progress was naturally slow, but the period of experiment appears to have passed; for the number of first-year students taking full work rose in the autumn of 1912 to 71 as against 45 the year before, and these 71 were graduates of 35 different colleges in all parts of the country.

Friends of the University are trying to raise money for a building for the Department of Music. The sum required to erect the building has been generously offered on condition that $50,000 is subscribed for its maintenance, and this is nearly accomplished. An effort is also being made to enlarge the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in accordance, with the original plan, and the subscriptions for this purpose are well under way. The collections of American ethnology are large and constantly growing, too large already for the building new standing. When the addition is built the University Museum designed by Mr. Agassiz will be complete.

University Press.

The University now possesses several special funds for the publication of books or periodicals on various subjects. These funds in the aggregate are considerably, but there is a growing conviction that a great institution of learning cannot attain its full usefulness without a university press which can publish the writings of its scholars. To that object the special funds now in hand would contribute greatly. Yet it is not enough that certain subjects are provided for. Nor do these funds enable the University to do its own printing. It would be an advantage, and in the long run as economy, if we could collect fonts of type in different languages which a commercial printer can ill afford to buy for the text or notes to an occasional book which may come into his hands. Many of the books issued by a university press would more than pay for themselves. Almost all of them would pay a part of their cost, but some works of great scholarly value yield little and can be published in no other way. If selected by a judicious committee, the publications of such a press would contribute much to the credit of the University, and, what is more important, would stimulate productive scholarship which still lags behind in America. Neither the initial cost of such a press nor the expense of maintenance is very large, but an endowment is absolutely essential if it is to be established. A committee has been appointed to consider the subject and ascertain whether the funds can be procured.

Forms of Useful Gifts.

One word about the form of gifts that will ensure the greatest usefulness. Sometimes benefactors encumber their funds with provisions too inelastic in their application. The object may well be made precise, so that the intent shall be strictly observed; but the best means of attaining that object may vary in the course of time. Permanent funds endure into an indefinite future, and it is not wise to try to be wiser than all posterity. The details of application for the object named may often be left to the sagacity of those who will come hereafter.

In a brief annual report it is impossible even to touch upon all the manifold activities of the University. It is better to confine one's remarks to the matters of most common interest, without intending to imply that other things are of less importance. Nothing has, therefore, been said here of many of our great departments, such as the Observatory, the Arboretum, the Bussey Institution, the Museums, and the laboratories. For these and for more detailed information about the different Faculties and Schools, the Overseers and friends of the University are respectfully referred to the reports of the Deans and Directors which are submitted and printed herewith.

Under the old plan in 1911 17.1 per cent of the candidates were rejected, and 8.1 per cent did not reappear to complete their examinations in September; in 1912, 19.1 per cent were rejected, and 6.1 per cent failed to reappear.

The distribution of the students admitted by the new method--geographically, and as between public and private schools,--does not differ much from last year, save that private preparatory schools in Massachusetts have begun to make some use of the new plan. Since it gives them greater freedom in their curricula, they are likely to resort to it more in the future. The following table shows the distribution for the two years by percentages:   1911  1912   Old Plan  New Plan  Old Plan  New Plan Public Schools,  45.7  80.5  41.8  79 Private and endowed schools,  54.2  19.4  58.1  20.9 Schools in Massachusetts,  72  41  72.7  42.2 Schools in New England,  85  47  87.1  51.2 Schools in other Atlantic States,  8.5  31  8.1  28.5 Schools west of the Alleghenies,  4.5  21  3.8  19.4

The results of the examinations will be found in greater detail in the report of the Chairman of the Committee on Admission.

That the new examinations are a good test of fitness for college work would seem clear from the records in their first year of the students recruited thereby, as shown in the report of the Dean of Harvard College. The proportion of low grades among the seventy-nine Freshmen who entered in this way in 1911 is much less, and the proportion of high grades decidedly larger, than for the average of the class. These young men have proved that they are qualified to pursue college studies; and, whether they could have passed all the examinations required under the old plan or not, they are admitted without conditions. The result is that of the 598 men who were admitted by examination and actually entered the Freshman class in 1912, 402, or more than two-thirds, entered clear. That is a great advantage both to them and to the College, for conditions are an additional burden upon students who ought to devote all their scholastic energy to college work. They are a heavy drag upon the Freshman year. Borne chiefly by the weakest, or least well equipped, they hold these men back and slow down the pace of the whole class.

Choices for Concentration.

The report for last year contained also a table showing the number of Freshmen who had chosen each of the fields of study for the concentration of their college work. The choices made by the Freshmen last May were not very different; but for that very reason, as showing a tendency rather than accident, a comparison of the two years is not without interest. The principal changes are increases in the actual numbers concentrating in Classics, English, Comparative Literature, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Philosophy; and a slight relative decrease in the number in the group of History, Economics, and Government.

CHOICES OF SUBJECTS OF CONCENTRATION.   Class  Class   of  of Subjects  1914  1915 The Classics,  12  22 English,  42  74 Romance Languages,  45  39 Germanic Languages,  9  14 Comparative Literature,  3  12 History and Literature,  9  4 Fine Arts,  12  14 Music,  9  6 Architecture,  6 Too vaguely expressed as Modern Languages,  9 Total, Group I,  156  185 Engineering,  55  43 Chemistry,  38  72 Biology,  14  12 Geology,  5  4 Physics,  4  7 Anthropology,  1 Special Combinations,    3 Too vaguely expressed as Natural Sciences,  2 Total, Group II,  119  141 Economics,  133  132 History,  41  50 Government,  25  33 Anthropology,    2 Too vaguely expressed as History and Political Sciences,  33 Total, Group III,  232  217 Mathematics,  9  21 Philosophy,  3  9 Total, Group IV,  12  30

PERCENTAGES OF CONCENTRATION. Language, Literature, Fine Arts, and Music,  30%  32% Natural Sciences,  23%  25% Economics, History, Government,  45%  38% Mathematics and Philosophy,  2%  5%

A few men have been allowed for good reasons to change their field of concentration, but they are not numerous enough to have a material effect upon the percentage. These tables indicate the main subjects of the students' work, but we must remember that they by no means express either the range of studies pursued by the individual student or the amount of instruction given by the several departments, for every undergraduate is obliged to distribute six of his courses among the groups in which his main work does not lie, and he may use his four free courses in the same way.

Oral Examinations.

The oral examinations in French and German, which went into effect for the Class of 1914, required that no student should be registered as a Junior unless he could read one of those languages with fair ease and accuracy. The examinations were held three or four times a year; and the result, as stated in the last annual report, has been that each time about one half of the applicants failed. But the student may work on the language and try until he passes; and the upshot illustrates the general experience that students will rise to any reasonable standard which is seriously required; for by the end of October, 1912, only thirty-three members of the Class of 1914 had failed to pass the examination. Thus the object of the rule has been in large measure attained--that of ensuring among the upper classmen an ability to use books in at least one foreign language.

General Examinations.

In the last annual report the adoption of general examinations in the Medical School, as a substitute for, or supplement to, the passing of a series of separate courses was described, and it was stated that the subject was under consideration in the Divinity School also. A general examination of this character has now been adopted for the degree of Bachelor of Divinity, and for that of Master of Divinity. The latter is a new degree conferred after a year of study, and designed to replace so far as possible the degree of Master of Arts hitherto conferred upon graduate students in the School by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The regulations for these general examinations in the Divinity School, and for the courses of study leading thereto, are printed in an appendix to this report.

The same principle has been discussed in Harvard College. After a year of careful study, the Division of History and Political Science,--comprising the Departments of History, Economics, and Government,--formulated a plan for a general examination before graduation of students concentrating in these subjects. The plan, which was brought before the Faculty this autumn, was adopted after debate in three meetings, and has since been approved by the governing boards. It lays down briefly the general principles, and, together with the outline of this plan prepared by the Division, will be found in a second appendix to this report.

In describing the general examinations for the Medical School something was said of the principle on which they are based; but the subject merits fuller treatment, because it involves a more radical change in American educational practice than anything the University has done for many years. It means a change not so much in machinery as in object; not of methods alone, but of the point of view. So far as I am aware, general examinations of some kind exist in all European universities, except for a degree with a mere pass in Scotland and the provincial universities of England. They have been used in the past in American colleges. In a very crude form they were at one time prescribed for graduation from Harvard; and in some other colleges they lasted until after the middle of the last century. Since the curriculum of those colleges comprised many subjects, the examination, which covered them all, was open to the criticism now heard of the general examination for graduation from the German Gymnasium. It was almost of necessity a review of unconnected studies; an effort of memory, preceded by a strenuous cram. But whether in such a test the disadvantages outweigh the benefits or not, it was quite inapplicable after the elective system had been adopted in a thorough-going form at Harvard and more or less completely by other colleges. The student being allowed to select as he pleased among all the courses of instruction offered by the Faculty, a general examination would have covered a different ground for each student; would have been merely a repetition of the examinations in separate courses which the student had already passed; and could not have required reading outside of the courses, or demanded a correlation of information obtained in courses in diverse fields. But now that every student is obliged to take six courses in some one field, the situation has changed, and the way is open for this valuable instrument of education in that field. To the courses distributed among other subjects it is still inapplicable; but in the field of the student's concentration his attention can be directed, as it should be, to the subject pursued, rather than to the particular courses taken, which then become not ends in themselves but only efficient means to an end. By examinations well devised for the purpose the student can be made to reflect upon the subject as a whole, correlating the several parts; and the interest of an intelligent man follows his efforts. Moreover, he can be induced to read books outside the strict limits of his courses in order to fill in the gaps; for the habit of independent reading has fallen sadly out of use among undergraduates at the present day.

Drawbacks of Plan.

A general examination has drawbacks as well as merits. If it tends to fix attention on a subject wider than any single course, it tends also to make the passing of that examination the goal, and to lessen interest in matters unlikely to appear there; and hence, unskillfully used, it may lead to the cramming of information by expert tutors without serious effort to master the subject. But if skillfully used, it may be made a powerful instrument for promoting co-ordination of knowledge, a broad comprehension of the subject, a grasp of underlying principles instead of memory of detached facts, and in some subjects may provide an incentive to intellectual effort such as no other type of examination can offer.

The benefits to be gained from a general examination are not needed equally in all fields of learning. In some subjects, like Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry, every advanced course must require familiarity with the principles taught in the more elementary ones, so that an examination in the higher branches measures fairly well the command of the whole subject. In other departments, notably History, there is little natural sequence, and a student may in his Senior year pass an excellent examination in a course on Europe in the nineteenth century although he has completely forgotten the American history he studied as a Sophomore,--and yet the events on the two sides of the Atlantic are intimately related parts of one movement in human progress. The general examination may well be applied, therefore, in one field while it is not in another; and the Faculty has been wise in allowing one division to adopt the plan without requiring uniformity in all.

If the general examination stood alone, the optimism of many undergraduates would lead them to postpone preparation until the time drew near, and then it would be too late. This could be justified only on the assumption that the function of the College was limited to providing earnest men with opportunities for education, probably with the result, witnessed in the German universities, that a large part of the students would make no attempt to obtain or earn a degree. No one would advocate such a plan for undergraduates here. American colleges must strive to form character, to induce habits of diligence; and they must do so all the more because, unlike the German universities, they are not groups of professional schools with the stimulus of direct preparation for one's career in life. It is not proposed, therefore, to abandon examinations in the several courses except so far as they occur at the same time as the general examination. Moreover, if the student is expected to study a subject, to regard his courses as means rather than ends, to do some outside reading, he must have special guidance beyond that which is provided in the courses he takes. There must be tutors, not unlike those at the English universities, who confer with the students frequently, not about their work in courses alone, but also about their outside reading and their preparation for the final test that lies before them. Tutors of this kind are an integral and necessary factor in the plan. To provide them will require money, part of which has been promised, while the rest must be sought from friends of the College; and the benefit to the students is well worth the expense involved. The great advantage for the average student of a general examination upon his principal field of study, lies in forcing him to correlate what he has studied, to keep it in mind as a body of connected learning, to fill in gaps by reading, to appreciate that all true education must be in great part self-education, a personal effort to advance on the difficult path of knowledge, not a half-reluctant transportation through college in perambulators pushed by instructors.

No one in close touch with American education has failed to deplore the lack among the mass of undergraduates of keen interest in their studies, the small regard for scholarly attainment; and a general examination upon a field of concentration seems to offer the most promising means of improvement. It was the method adopted in England a hundred years ago. The class tests at Oxford based on general public examinations began in 1802, and five years later they were divided into the Honour Schools of Literae Humaniores and Mathematics and Physics. The Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge began in 1747, the Civil Law Classes in 1815, the Classical Tripos in 1824. The other triposes at Cambridge and Honour Schools at Oxford were established at various dates after the middle of the nineteenth century. The effect in stimulating interest in scholarship and respect for high rank was rapid, profound, and permanent. Success in the examinations has been universally accepted as a test of ability and a gateway to the careers entered by Oxford and Cambridge men. The failure of American undergraduates, and, following their lead, of the American public at large, to value excellence in college scholarship is due in part, as the students themselves declare, to the fact that rank in courses depends upon the varying standards maintained by different instructors. It is due also to a sincere doubt whether one who can accumulate the largest number of high marks in short stretches of work is really the ablest man. Much must be ascribed, moreover, to the absence of competition on a large scale. So long as college men are all trading separate paths, crossing at many points but never leading to a common goal there can be little of that conviction of superior qualities which attached to the man who succeeds in achieving what many others are striving for. A well-ordered general examination avoids all of these imperfections, for it provides a uniform standard, a competitive test and a run long enough to call out the whole power of the man. The stimulus is not only good for those who hope to win high distinction, but will tend also to leaven the whole mass.

Control of Athletics.

To turn from studies to athletics is to leave a region where competition has been neglected for one where it has been carried to an extreme by the students themselves. The prevailing interest in athletic sports has done much for so-briefly and cleanliness of life in college, but the vast scale of the public games has brought its problems. They have long ceased to be an undergraduate diversion, managed entirely by the students, and maintained by their subscriptions. They have become great spectacles supported by the sale of tickets to thousands of people; while experience has proved that skilful coaching will determine the victory between teams of approximately equal strength. The result has been an enormous growth in expenditure until the authorities have felt compelled to take part in supervising it. The experiment of control by an Athletic Committee composed of three members of the Faculty and three graduates appointed by the Governing Boards, and three undergraduates selected by the captains of the teams, has brought improvement. Extravagence has been curtailed; but, with a revenue of about two hundred thousand dollars a year, money comes easily and is easily spend under the spur of intense public interest in the result of the major contests, and a little laxity quickly leads to grave abuse. Extravagance still exists and vigilant supervision is required to reduce it. Graduates, who form public opinion on these matters, must realize that intercollegiate victories are not the most important objects of college education. Nor must they forget the need of physical training for the mass of students by neglecting to encourage the efforts recently made to cultivate healthful sports among men who have no prospect of playing on the college teams.

Freshman Dormitories.

The promotion of a better college life, physical, intellectual and moral, has received much attention of late among men engaged in education. At Harvard we believe that a vital matter is to launch the student aright on the new freedom of college life by means of Freshman dormitories; and it is a pleasure to state that enough money has been subscribed to build three out of the four buildings projected. These three will house over four hundred and fifty students, or by far the greater part of the present Freshman class that does not live at home. One of them will be paid for by the bequest of the late George Smith, left to the College many years ago to accumulate until it reached the sum required to build a group of three dormitories of the collective size of one of the quadrangles designed. Another has been generously given by Mrs. Russell Sage, and at her reqpest will be named Standish Hall. The third is provided by a large number of subscriptions from alumni and others. The project will not be complete until the fourth is given, but the erection of the first three will be begun early in the coming year, as soon as the working plans, now progressing rapidly, have been completed. One of the quadrangles will be on Boylston street, behind the Power House, while the others will be built farther to the east along the parkway as far as De Wolf street. Their buildings will stand on three sides of quadrangles, the fourth side facing the river being open to the south. The architect, Mr. Charles A. Coolidge, has adapted to the purpose with great skill the colonial style of the older buildings in the College Yard.

People not very familiar with the progress of the plan have expressed a fear that the Freshmen would be treated like boys at boarding school; but that would defeat the very object in view, of teaching them to use sensibly the large liberty of college life. Liberty is taught to young men not by regulations, but by its exercise in a proper environment. The vital matter is the atmosphere and the traditions in which the youth is placed on entering college. At present he is too much enchained in a narrow set of friends who copy one another, not always wisely, and come too little into contact with the broadening influences of the college community as a whole. Hence he fails to see how much he can get out of college life, or finds it out too late to reap the full benefit thereof. The Seniors show their appreciation of all this by rooming together in the Yard, but they end where they should have begun.

Graduate School of Applied Science.

In the School of Applied Science important changes have taken place during the year. A number of technical courses have been removed from the list open to undergraduates, carrying forward the design of placing the School on a graduate basis. At the same time the plan of instruction has been modified and made more intensive in method, so that a college graduate without technical preparation can be taught his Engineering, Mining, or Architecture in the shortest possible period. No doubt it will take time for the community to learn that a man who hopes to rise high in his profession gains in the end by a college education preceding his technical studies. Engineering ought to stand among the liberal professions which are enriched by a general education, and in fact the number of college men who enter engineering schools, though still small, is increasing year by year.

The organization of the School has also been altered. At the suggestion of the instructors, the departments have been formed into Schools of Engineering, of Mining and Metallurgy, of Architecture and so forth, each under a Council of instructors, the whole being grouped under a new and distinct Faculty of Applied Science. This has the double advantage of giving the Schools a more strictly professional tone under the government of a body devoted wholly to their interests, and of relieving the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of questions hardly germane to its regular work. The new organization nominally went into effect in September, 1912, but in fact the Faculty of Applied Science began its services in the year covered by this report, and its members are glad to work out their common problems in a meeting of this kind.

The Graduate Schools of Applied Science possess an admirable staff of professors, and already in some directions excellent equipment, but as yet few students, for the reputation in the profession which fills the classes is naturally of slow growth. It cannot be stimulated rapidly, and depends upon the achievements of the men that the institution has produced. These are the principal means of recruiting fresh students for any school, and years must always pass before their influence in the community is strongly felt.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Since the last report was written the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has decided, at the request of great numbers of our fellow citizens, to erect its new buildings in Cambridge, and this brings home to us the question whether some co-operation between the two institutions is not possible in the training of students who are graduates of colleges or technical schools. That would not trench upon the principal field of the Institute of Technology, while it would add greatly in the efficiency of training college graduates, to whose needs the curriculum provided for boys coming from high schools is imperfectly adapted. The number of such college graduates is, and for an indefinite time to come will be, far too small to justify two separate schools; and that is even more true of the men who, after finishing the regular technical course, want to pursue advanced work. To maintain two distinct plants, fully staffed and equipped, for the teaching of an insufficient number of students in the most expensive of all kinds of education is not only a waste of educational resources, but entails an even more pitiful loss of efficiency. The momentum obtained by a combined effort would be far greater than that of two separate schools striving singly for the same object. No plan of co-operation has been devised, but the difficulties ought not to be insuperable if approached with mutual good will and a sense that an educational institution does not exist solely for its own glory, but as a means to a larger end.

The Law School.

Some comment was aroused by the decline in the number of students in the Law School at the opening of the term of October, 1912; but this is due, as the Dean explains in his report, not to the size of the entering class, which is substantially as large as ever, but to raising the standard for continuing in the School in the case of men whose work has been defective. Since the School has grown larger it has become both possible and necessary to insist on thoroughly satisfactory work by all students who attend the classes and who by their very presence affect the standard. The number of graduates of Harvard College who enter the School has, indeed, fallen of late years; but, this, as the elaborate report of the National Bureau of Education on the occupation of college graduates shows, is part of a general movement which is felt most promptly at Harvard. To inquire into its causes would not be possible here. It is enough to point out that the occupations in which college men engage have enlarged greatly, and the attractions of business life have grown stronger. The report of the Bureau, with its diagrams of historic changes in the proportion of graduates following different vocations, is highly interesting.

Graduate School of Medicine.

The year has been marked in the Medical School by the appointment of two new deans. That of Dr. Bradford as Dean of the School has already been mentioned. The other office is new. For many years courses of instruction, both clinical and in the laboratories, have been offered for the benefit of physicians and surgeons in active practice. A large part of these have been included in the Medical Summer School, while others have been given in term-time. The science and art of medicine are advancing so rapidly that many practitioners are glad of opportunities to gain a greater familiarity with recent methods than they can get from medical journals alone; and the Faculty felt that instruction of this character could profitably be made more systematic. A Graduate School of Medicine has, therefore, been created, with a separate dean and administrative board, and to some extent an additional staff of instructors, although not a distinct Faculty. Dr. Horace David Arnold has been appointed Dean; and the School opened its courses in October, 1912, with a very promising registration.

Hospitals.

Reference has been made on a preceding page and in former reports to the closer relations between the Medical School and the different hospitals. The central factor in the movement is the alliance with the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, situated opposite the main entrance to the School. The buildings are nearly completed, and will be ready for the first patients in a few weeks. In accordance with the arrangement for a joint selection of the staff of the Hospital and instructors in the School. Dr. Christian, our Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine, is the Physician-in-Chief of the Hospital, and Dr. Harvey Cushing, formerly of Johns Hopkins University, is Surgeon-in-Chief and has taken his chair as Moseley Professor of Surgery at the School. The other members of the staff have been selected by mutual understanding.

Notable also in the history of the School have been the opening of the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital for Cancer in close co-operation with the School, and the calling for the first time of a non-resident to a chair in the School and a leading position on the staff of the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. David Linn Edsall, formerly of the University of Pennsylvania and later of Washington University at St. Louis, was appointed chief of one of the two continuous medical services at the Hospital and Jackson Professor of Clinical Medicine in the School. The only other appointment to a full professorship has been the promotion of George Gray Scars to Clinical Professor of Medicine.

Medical School Discoveries.

The year has been remarkable for a series of contributions to medical science made at the School. During the summer and autumn of 1912 Dr. Folin published his discoveries in metabolism, which made a profound impression, and his analysis of the blood in cases of rheumatism and gout; Dr. Mallory, his discovery of the germ of whooping cough; while Dr. Rosenau, with the co-operation of Dr. Richardson of the State Board of Health and Professor Wheeler of the Bussey Institution, ascertained that infantile paralysis was transmitted through a species of stable fly (Stomoxys calcitrans). Enlarging the bounds of knowledge is a function of a university no less essential than imparting it; and in one field are the two more closely connected today than in medicine. Three such discoveries in the course of a single year are, therefore, a deep source of gratification.

Exchange Professorships.

During the year we have been fortunate in our exchange professors, both in those we have received and those we have sent forth. From France came Dr. Charles Dichl, Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Paris; from Germany Dr. Willy Kuekenthal, Professor of Zoology and Director of the Zoological Institute at the University of Breslau. To Berlin we sent Professor Theobald Smith of the Medical School, and to Paris Professor William Morris Davis of the Geological Department. The alliance whereby we are to send annually a member of our staff to lecture for a month at each of four Western colleges, Knox, Beloit, Grinnell, and Colorado, was inaugurated during the second half of the year by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart. Instructors were sent to Harvard by two only of these colleges. They were Walter Houghton Freeman, Instructor in Greek at Grinnell, who acted as Assistant in Greek here; and Elijah Clarence Hill, Head Professor of Romance Languages and Literature of Colorado, who gave an independent course in Spanish-American poetry.

Widener Memorial Library.

The University as a whole rejoices in the munificent offer of a new library building by Mrs. George D. Widener. Gore Hall has long been lamentably insufficient to contain the books on its catalogue. Many thousands of them, in yearly increasing numbers, have been stored in the basements of other buildings, while Gore Hall itself has been far too crowded for a proper use even of the volumes on its shelves. Among the precious lives lost on the "Titanic" was that of Harry Elkins Widener of the class of 1907, a rare collector of rare books. His collection, comprising many editions of great value and interest, he left to his mother, with a request to give it to Harvard when there was a building suitable for the purpose. But Gore Hall was not fireproof, and Mrs. Widener, in view of the conditions, generously determined to build a complete university library on the general interior plan worked out by our committee of architects a year ago, with additional rooms for her son's books in a part of the open court in the centre of the building. These rooms and the volumes they contain are to be under the charge of a special librarian selected by Mrs. Widener, who gives also a fund of $150,000 to care for, and at her discretion to enlarge, the collection. The other parts of the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library will form the four sides of a quadrangle, whereof the northern side, with the main entrance, will cover very nearly the site of the present Gore Hall, and the south front will be about one hundred feet from Massachusetts avenue. The building will contain one large and several smaller reading rooms on the North, and rooms for seminars on the upper floor; while the greater part of the eastern, western and southern sections will be occupied by the stack, in which, however, there will be provided working rooms for professors and a large number of tables separated by glass screens for other readers. Such an arrangement is designed to make the stack as convenient of access as possible to the scholars who use it, so that they may work with all their tools at hand.

Housing our books where they would be safe and could be used during the construction of the new building was no easy problem. It has been solved partly by turning Upper and Lower Massachusetts into reading-rooms; partly by the hospitality of Andover Theological Seminary, which has kindly allowed us to use any vacant space on its shelves; partly by sending appropriate books to various departmental libraries; but chiefly by transferring the students' dining-tables from Randall Hall to Foxcroft, and building temporary stacks for four hundred thousand volumes in the Hall, one of the few fireproof buildings we possess. Although the transfer of the books was made in term-time, it was carried out by Professor Coolidge, the Director of the Library, with such skill that there has been almost no interruption in their use.

Coolidge Memorial Laboratory.

Another important gift of a building has been that of a chemical laboratory by the Hon. T. Jefferson Coolidge in memory of his son, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, Jr., of the class of 1884. This building will be nearly of the same size as the Wolcott Gibbs Laboratory, and will be used for quantitative analysis. It faces Divinity avenue, and will form part of the proposed, and sorely needed, group of chemical laboratories between that avenue and Oxford street. Work upon it had been carried on as rapidly as possible, with the result that by the end of the year 1912 the outer walls were built and the timbers of the root were laid, ensuring its readiness for use before the opening of the next college year.

Other Gifts.

Of the other gifts received the largest have been: that of Mrs. Sage for the Freshman Dormitory; $100,000 from the class of 1887 on its twenty-fifth anniversary; $125,000 from Mr. Edmund Cogswell Converse to found a professorship of Banking in the School of Business Administration; $100,000 from Mrs. Collis P. Huntington for the construction of the Cancer Hospital; $74,285.71 from the estate of Mrs. William O. Moseley for travelling fellowships in the Medical School; $50,000 from the estate of Miss Harrlet E. Goodnow to keep poor students in Harvard College; $50,000 from Mr. George R. Agassiz for the use of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. These and many other benefactions are described more fully in the report of the Treasurer.

Pressing Needs of University.

Recipients of such generosity seem churlish in asking for more, but our needs are ever outrunning out resources, and one of the objects of the annual report is to point them out. There is still a deficit in the University, College and Library account, although for the year 1911-12 it was reduced to $14,750.40. Until it disappears we cannot expect an expansion of those departments that are undermanned, and still less any increase in salaries. That the incomes of professors are inadequate in view of the grade of talent required is generally admitted, and the constant rise in prices has been reducing their purchasing power year by year. One of the most pressing needs is more laboratories for instruction and research in Chemistry, perhaps the most promsing field for scientific investigation and one in which our equipment is still singularly insufficient. Another is an endowment for the Dental School, the imperative need of which was urged in the last report with a reference to the great services rendered to the public by the operating rooms and the sacrifices of the clinical instructors. Still another is the endowment of professorships in the School of Business Administration. One such, in Banking, has been founded as already stated by the generosity of Mr. Converse, but three more are required, and efforts are being made to raise the funds by subscriptions. Every professional school has meant the substitution of thorough instruction in the principles of an art for the slower and less comprehensive process of learning them by apprenticeship; and this School is based on a belief that the principles governing business organization and methods, which have been wrought out in practice by the labor of a generation of expert administrators, can be taught in a way to save the time of the student and make him more efficient. No new professional school, moreover, demonstrates its full value swiftly, and we need not be surprised that most of the students in our School still think a single year of its training sufficient. That the School, however, has already won recognition of its usefulness is proved by the rapid increase in the number of men entering it. During the first few years the progress was naturally slow, but the period of experiment appears to have passed; for the number of first-year students taking full work rose in the autumn of 1912 to 71 as against 45 the year before, and these 71 were graduates of 35 different colleges in all parts of the country.

Friends of the University are trying to raise money for a building for the Department of Music. The sum required to erect the building has been generously offered on condition that $50,000 is subscribed for its maintenance, and this is nearly accomplished. An effort is also being made to enlarge the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in accordance, with the original plan, and the subscriptions for this purpose are well under way. The collections of American ethnology are large and constantly growing, too large already for the building new standing. When the addition is built the University Museum designed by Mr. Agassiz will be complete.

University Press.

The University now possesses several special funds for the publication of books or periodicals on various subjects. These funds in the aggregate are considerably, but there is a growing conviction that a great institution of learning cannot attain its full usefulness without a university press which can publish the writings of its scholars. To that object the special funds now in hand would contribute greatly. Yet it is not enough that certain subjects are provided for. Nor do these funds enable the University to do its own printing. It would be an advantage, and in the long run as economy, if we could collect fonts of type in different languages which a commercial printer can ill afford to buy for the text or notes to an occasional book which may come into his hands. Many of the books issued by a university press would more than pay for themselves. Almost all of them would pay a part of their cost, but some works of great scholarly value yield little and can be published in no other way. If selected by a judicious committee, the publications of such a press would contribute much to the credit of the University, and, what is more important, would stimulate productive scholarship which still lags behind in America. Neither the initial cost of such a press nor the expense of maintenance is very large, but an endowment is absolutely essential if it is to be established. A committee has been appointed to consider the subject and ascertain whether the funds can be procured.

Forms of Useful Gifts.

One word about the form of gifts that will ensure the greatest usefulness. Sometimes benefactors encumber their funds with provisions too inelastic in their application. The object may well be made precise, so that the intent shall be strictly observed; but the best means of attaining that object may vary in the course of time. Permanent funds endure into an indefinite future, and it is not wise to try to be wiser than all posterity. The details of application for the object named may often be left to the sagacity of those who will come hereafter.

In a brief annual report it is impossible even to touch upon all the manifold activities of the University. It is better to confine one's remarks to the matters of most common interest, without intending to imply that other things are of less importance. Nothing has, therefore, been said here of many of our great departments, such as the Observatory, the Arboretum, the Bussey Institution, the Museums, and the laboratories. For these and for more detailed information about the different Faculties and Schools, the Overseers and friends of the University are respectfully referred to the reports of the Deans and Directors which are submitted and printed herewith.

The results of the examinations will be found in greater detail in the report of the Chairman of the Committee on Admission.

That the new examinations are a good test of fitness for college work would seem clear from the records in their first year of the students recruited thereby, as shown in the report of the Dean of Harvard College. The proportion of low grades among the seventy-nine Freshmen who entered in this way in 1911 is much less, and the proportion of high grades decidedly larger, than for the average of the class. These young men have proved that they are qualified to pursue college studies; and, whether they could have passed all the examinations required under the old plan or not, they are admitted without conditions. The result is that of the 598 men who were admitted by examination and actually entered the Freshman class in 1912, 402, or more than two-thirds, entered clear. That is a great advantage both to them and to the College, for conditions are an additional burden upon students who ought to devote all their scholastic energy to college work. They are a heavy drag upon the Freshman year. Borne chiefly by the weakest, or least well equipped, they hold these men back and slow down the pace of the whole class.

Choices for Concentration.

The report for last year contained also a table showing the number of Freshmen who had chosen each of the fields of study for the concentration of their college work. The choices made by the Freshmen last May were not very different; but for that very reason, as showing a tendency rather than accident, a comparison of the two years is not without interest. The principal changes are increases in the actual numbers concentrating in Classics, English, Comparative Literature, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Philosophy; and a slight relative decrease in the number in the group of History, Economics, and Government.

CHOICES OF SUBJECTS OF CONCENTRATION.   Class  Class   of  of Subjects  1914  1915 The Classics,  12  22 English,  42  74 Romance Languages,  45  39 Germanic Languages,  9  14 Comparative Literature,  3  12 History and Literature,  9  4 Fine Arts,  12  14 Music,  9  6 Architecture,  6 Too vaguely expressed as Modern Languages,  9 Total, Group I,  156  185 Engineering,  55  43 Chemistry,  38  72 Biology,  14  12 Geology,  5  4 Physics,  4  7 Anthropology,  1 Special Combinations,    3 Too vaguely expressed as Natural Sciences,  2 Total, Group II,  119  141 Economics,  133  132 History,  41  50 Government,  25  33 Anthropology,    2 Too vaguely expressed as History and Political Sciences,  33 Total, Group III,  232  217 Mathematics,  9  21 Philosophy,  3  9 Total, Group IV,  12  30

PERCENTAGES OF CONCENTRATION. Language, Literature, Fine Arts, and Music,  30%  32% Natural Sciences,  23%  25% Economics, History, Government,  45%  38% Mathematics and Philosophy,  2%  5%

A few men have been allowed for good reasons to change their field of concentration, but they are not numerous enough to have a material effect upon the percentage. These tables indicate the main subjects of the students' work, but we must remember that they by no means express either the range of studies pursued by the individual student or the amount of instruction given by the several departments, for every undergraduate is obliged to distribute six of his courses among the groups in which his main work does not lie, and he may use his four free courses in the same way.

Oral Examinations.

The oral examinations in French and German, which went into effect for the Class of 1914, required that no student should be registered as a Junior unless he could read one of those languages with fair ease and accuracy. The examinations were held three or four times a year; and the result, as stated in the last annual report, has been that each time about one half of the applicants failed. But the student may work on the language and try until he passes; and the upshot illustrates the general experience that students will rise to any reasonable standard which is seriously required; for by the end of October, 1912, only thirty-three members of the Class of 1914 had failed to pass the examination. Thus the object of the rule has been in large measure attained--that of ensuring among the upper classmen an ability to use books in at least one foreign language.

General Examinations.

In the last annual report the adoption of general examinations in the Medical School, as a substitute for, or supplement to, the passing of a series of separate courses was described, and it was stated that the subject was under consideration in the Divinity School also. A general examination of this character has now been adopted for the degree of Bachelor of Divinity, and for that of Master of Divinity. The latter is a new degree conferred after a year of study, and designed to replace so far as possible the degree of Master of Arts hitherto conferred upon graduate students in the School by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The regulations for these general examinations in the Divinity School, and for the courses of study leading thereto, are printed in an appendix to this report.

The same principle has been discussed in Harvard College. After a year of careful study, the Division of History and Political Science,--comprising the Departments of History, Economics, and Government,--formulated a plan for a general examination before graduation of students concentrating in these subjects. The plan, which was brought before the Faculty this autumn, was adopted after debate in three meetings, and has since been approved by the governing boards. It lays down briefly the general principles, and, together with the outline of this plan prepared by the Division, will be found in a second appendix to this report.

In describing the general examinations for the Medical School something was said of the principle on which they are based; but the subject merits fuller treatment, because it involves a more radical change in American educational practice than anything the University has done for many years. It means a change not so much in machinery as in object; not of methods alone, but of the point of view. So far as I am aware, general examinations of some kind exist in all European universities, except for a degree with a mere pass in Scotland and the provincial universities of England. They have been used in the past in American colleges. In a very crude form they were at one time prescribed for graduation from Harvard; and in some other colleges they lasted until after the middle of the last century. Since the curriculum of those colleges comprised many subjects, the examination, which covered them all, was open to the criticism now heard of the general examination for graduation from the German Gymnasium. It was almost of necessity a review of unconnected studies; an effort of memory, preceded by a strenuous cram. But whether in such a test the disadvantages outweigh the benefits or not, it was quite inapplicable after the elective system had been adopted in a thorough-going form at Harvard and more or less completely by other colleges. The student being allowed to select as he pleased among all the courses of instruction offered by the Faculty, a general examination would have covered a different ground for each student; would have been merely a repetition of the examinations in separate courses which the student had already passed; and could not have required reading outside of the courses, or demanded a correlation of information obtained in courses in diverse fields. But now that every student is obliged to take six courses in some one field, the situation has changed, and the way is open for this valuable instrument of education in that field. To the courses distributed among other subjects it is still inapplicable; but in the field of the student's concentration his attention can be directed, as it should be, to the subject pursued, rather than to the particular courses taken, which then become not ends in themselves but only efficient means to an end. By examinations well devised for the purpose the student can be made to reflect upon the subject as a whole, correlating the several parts; and the interest of an intelligent man follows his efforts. Moreover, he can be induced to read books outside the strict limits of his courses in order to fill in the gaps; for the habit of independent reading has fallen sadly out of use among undergraduates at the present day.

Drawbacks of Plan.

A general examination has drawbacks as well as merits. If it tends to fix attention on a subject wider than any single course, it tends also to make the passing of that examination the goal, and to lessen interest in matters unlikely to appear there; and hence, unskillfully used, it may lead to the cramming of information by expert tutors without serious effort to master the subject. But if skillfully used, it may be made a powerful instrument for promoting co-ordination of knowledge, a broad comprehension of the subject, a grasp of underlying principles instead of memory of detached facts, and in some subjects may provide an incentive to intellectual effort such as no other type of examination can offer.

The benefits to be gained from a general examination are not needed equally in all fields of learning. In some subjects, like Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry, every advanced course must require familiarity with the principles taught in the more elementary ones, so that an examination in the higher branches measures fairly well the command of the whole subject. In other departments, notably History, there is little natural sequence, and a student may in his Senior year pass an excellent examination in a course on Europe in the nineteenth century although he has completely forgotten the American history he studied as a Sophomore,--and yet the events on the two sides of the Atlantic are intimately related parts of one movement in human progress. The general examination may well be applied, therefore, in one field while it is not in another; and the Faculty has been wise in allowing one division to adopt the plan without requiring uniformity in all.

If the general examination stood alone, the optimism of many undergraduates would lead them to postpone preparation until the time drew near, and then it would be too late. This could be justified only on the assumption that the function of the College was limited to providing earnest men with opportunities for education, probably with the result, witnessed in the German universities, that a large part of the students would make no attempt to obtain or earn a degree. No one would advocate such a plan for undergraduates here. American colleges must strive to form character, to induce habits of diligence; and they must do so all the more because, unlike the German universities, they are not groups of professional schools with the stimulus of direct preparation for one's career in life. It is not proposed, therefore, to abandon examinations in the several courses except so far as they occur at the same time as the general examination. Moreover, if the student is expected to study a subject, to regard his courses as means rather than ends, to do some outside reading, he must have special guidance beyond that which is provided in the courses he takes. There must be tutors, not unlike those at the English universities, who confer with the students frequently, not about their work in courses alone, but also about their outside reading and their preparation for the final test that lies before them. Tutors of this kind are an integral and necessary factor in the plan. To provide them will require money, part of which has been promised, while the rest must be sought from friends of the College; and the benefit to the students is well worth the expense involved. The great advantage for the average student of a general examination upon his principal field of study, lies in forcing him to correlate what he has studied, to keep it in mind as a body of connected learning, to fill in gaps by reading, to appreciate that all true education must be in great part self-education, a personal effort to advance on the difficult path of knowledge, not a half-reluctant transportation through college in perambulators pushed by instructors.

No one in close touch with American education has failed to deplore the lack among the mass of undergraduates of keen interest in their studies, the small regard for scholarly attainment; and a general examination upon a field of concentration seems to offer the most promising means of improvement. It was the method adopted in England a hundred years ago. The class tests at Oxford based on general public examinations began in 1802, and five years later they were divided into the Honour Schools of Literae Humaniores and Mathematics and Physics. The Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge began in 1747, the Civil Law Classes in 1815, the Classical Tripos in 1824. The other triposes at Cambridge and Honour Schools at Oxford were established at various dates after the middle of the nineteenth century. The effect in stimulating interest in scholarship and respect for high rank was rapid, profound, and permanent. Success in the examinations has been universally accepted as a test of ability and a gateway to the careers entered by Oxford and Cambridge men. The failure of American undergraduates, and, following their lead, of the American public at large, to value excellence in college scholarship is due in part, as the students themselves declare, to the fact that rank in courses depends upon the varying standards maintained by different instructors. It is due also to a sincere doubt whether one who can accumulate the largest number of high marks in short stretches of work is really the ablest man. Much must be ascribed, moreover, to the absence of competition on a large scale. So long as college men are all trading separate paths, crossing at many points but never leading to a common goal there can be little of that conviction of superior qualities which attached to the man who succeeds in achieving what many others are striving for. A well-ordered general examination avoids all of these imperfections, for it provides a uniform standard, a competitive test and a run long enough to call out the whole power of the man. The stimulus is not only good for those who hope to win high distinction, but will tend also to leaven the whole mass.

Control of Athletics.

To turn from studies to athletics is to leave a region where competition has been neglected for one where it has been carried to an extreme by the students themselves. The prevailing interest in athletic sports has done much for so-briefly and cleanliness of life in college, but the vast scale of the public games has brought its problems. They have long ceased to be an undergraduate diversion, managed entirely by the students, and maintained by their subscriptions. They have become great spectacles supported by the sale of tickets to thousands of people; while experience has proved that skilful coaching will determine the victory between teams of approximately equal strength. The result has been an enormous growth in expenditure until the authorities have felt compelled to take part in supervising it. The experiment of control by an Athletic Committee composed of three members of the Faculty and three graduates appointed by the Governing Boards, and three undergraduates selected by the captains of the teams, has brought improvement. Extravagence has been curtailed; but, with a revenue of about two hundred thousand dollars a year, money comes easily and is easily spend under the spur of intense public interest in the result of the major contests, and a little laxity quickly leads to grave abuse. Extravagance still exists and vigilant supervision is required to reduce it. Graduates, who form public opinion on these matters, must realize that intercollegiate victories are not the most important objects of college education. Nor must they forget the need of physical training for the mass of students by neglecting to encourage the efforts recently made to cultivate healthful sports among men who have no prospect of playing on the college teams.

Freshman Dormitories.

The promotion of a better college life, physical, intellectual and moral, has received much attention of late among men engaged in education. At Harvard we believe that a vital matter is to launch the student aright on the new freedom of college life by means of Freshman dormitories; and it is a pleasure to state that enough money has been subscribed to build three out of the four buildings projected. These three will house over four hundred and fifty students, or by far the greater part of the present Freshman class that does not live at home. One of them will be paid for by the bequest of the late George Smith, left to the College many years ago to accumulate until it reached the sum required to build a group of three dormitories of the collective size of one of the quadrangles designed. Another has been generously given by Mrs. Russell Sage, and at her reqpest will be named Standish Hall. The third is provided by a large number of subscriptions from alumni and others. The project will not be complete until the fourth is given, but the erection of the first three will be begun early in the coming year, as soon as the working plans, now progressing rapidly, have been completed. One of the quadrangles will be on Boylston street, behind the Power House, while the others will be built farther to the east along the parkway as far as De Wolf street. Their buildings will stand on three sides of quadrangles, the fourth side facing the river being open to the south. The architect, Mr. Charles A. Coolidge, has adapted to the purpose with great skill the colonial style of the older buildings in the College Yard.

People not very familiar with the progress of the plan have expressed a fear that the Freshmen would be treated like boys at boarding school; but that would defeat the very object in view, of teaching them to use sensibly the large liberty of college life. Liberty is taught to young men not by regulations, but by its exercise in a proper environment. The vital matter is the atmosphere and the traditions in which the youth is placed on entering college. At present he is too much enchained in a narrow set of friends who copy one another, not always wisely, and come too little into contact with the broadening influences of the college community as a whole. Hence he fails to see how much he can get out of college life, or finds it out too late to reap the full benefit thereof. The Seniors show their appreciation of all this by rooming together in the Yard, but they end where they should have begun.

Graduate School of Applied Science.

In the School of Applied Science important changes have taken place during the year. A number of technical courses have been removed from the list open to undergraduates, carrying forward the design of placing the School on a graduate basis. At the same time the plan of instruction has been modified and made more intensive in method, so that a college graduate without technical preparation can be taught his Engineering, Mining, or Architecture in the shortest possible period. No doubt it will take time for the community to learn that a man who hopes to rise high in his profession gains in the end by a college education preceding his technical studies. Engineering ought to stand among the liberal professions which are enriched by a general education, and in fact the number of college men who enter engineering schools, though still small, is increasing year by year.

The organization of the School has also been altered. At the suggestion of the instructors, the departments have been formed into Schools of Engineering, of Mining and Metallurgy, of Architecture and so forth, each under a Council of instructors, the whole being grouped under a new and distinct Faculty of Applied Science. This has the double advantage of giving the Schools a more strictly professional tone under the government of a body devoted wholly to their interests, and of relieving the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of questions hardly germane to its regular work. The new organization nominally went into effect in September, 1912, but in fact the Faculty of Applied Science began its services in the year covered by this report, and its members are glad to work out their common problems in a meeting of this kind.

The Graduate Schools of Applied Science possess an admirable staff of professors, and already in some directions excellent equipment, but as yet few students, for the reputation in the profession which fills the classes is naturally of slow growth. It cannot be stimulated rapidly, and depends upon the achievements of the men that the institution has produced. These are the principal means of recruiting fresh students for any school, and years must always pass before their influence in the community is strongly felt.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Since the last report was written the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has decided, at the request of great numbers of our fellow citizens, to erect its new buildings in Cambridge, and this brings home to us the question whether some co-operation between the two institutions is not possible in the training of students who are graduates of colleges or technical schools. That would not trench upon the principal field of the Institute of Technology, while it would add greatly in the efficiency of training college graduates, to whose needs the curriculum provided for boys coming from high schools is imperfectly adapted. The number of such college graduates is, and for an indefinite time to come will be, far too small to justify two separate schools; and that is even more true of the men who, after finishing the regular technical course, want to pursue advanced work. To maintain two distinct plants, fully staffed and equipped, for the teaching of an insufficient number of students in the most expensive of all kinds of education is not only a waste of educational resources, but entails an even more pitiful loss of efficiency. The momentum obtained by a combined effort would be far greater than that of two separate schools striving singly for the same object. No plan of co-operation has been devised, but the difficulties ought not to be insuperable if approached with mutual good will and a sense that an educational institution does not exist solely for its own glory, but as a means to a larger end.

The Law School.

Some comment was aroused by the decline in the number of students in the Law School at the opening of the term of October, 1912; but this is due, as the Dean explains in his report, not to the size of the entering class, which is substantially as large as ever, but to raising the standard for continuing in the School in the case of men whose work has been defective. Since the School has grown larger it has become both possible and necessary to insist on thoroughly satisfactory work by all students who attend the classes and who by their very presence affect the standard. The number of graduates of Harvard College who enter the School has, indeed, fallen of late years; but, this, as the elaborate report of the National Bureau of Education on the occupation of college graduates shows, is part of a general movement which is felt most promptly at Harvard. To inquire into its causes would not be possible here. It is enough to point out that the occupations in which college men engage have enlarged greatly, and the attractions of business life have grown stronger. The report of the Bureau, with its diagrams of historic changes in the proportion of graduates following different vocations, is highly interesting.

Graduate School of Medicine.

The year has been marked in the Medical School by the appointment of two new deans. That of Dr. Bradford as Dean of the School has already been mentioned. The other office is new. For many years courses of instruction, both clinical and in the laboratories, have been offered for the benefit of physicians and surgeons in active practice. A large part of these have been included in the Medical Summer School, while others have been given in term-time. The science and art of medicine are advancing so rapidly that many practitioners are glad of opportunities to gain a greater familiarity with recent methods than they can get from medical journals alone; and the Faculty felt that instruction of this character could profitably be made more systematic. A Graduate School of Medicine has, therefore, been created, with a separate dean and administrative board, and to some extent an additional staff of instructors, although not a distinct Faculty. Dr. Horace David Arnold has been appointed Dean; and the School opened its courses in October, 1912, with a very promising registration.

Hospitals.

Reference has been made on a preceding page and in former reports to the closer relations between the Medical School and the different hospitals. The central factor in the movement is the alliance with the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, situated opposite the main entrance to the School. The buildings are nearly completed, and will be ready for the first patients in a few weeks. In accordance with the arrangement for a joint selection of the staff of the Hospital and instructors in the School. Dr. Christian, our Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine, is the Physician-in-Chief of the Hospital, and Dr. Harvey Cushing, formerly of Johns Hopkins University, is Surgeon-in-Chief and has taken his chair as Moseley Professor of Surgery at the School. The other members of the staff have been selected by mutual understanding.

Notable also in the history of the School have been the opening of the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital for Cancer in close co-operation with the School, and the calling for the first time of a non-resident to a chair in the School and a leading position on the staff of the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. David Linn Edsall, formerly of the University of Pennsylvania and later of Washington University at St. Louis, was appointed chief of one of the two continuous medical services at the Hospital and Jackson Professor of Clinical Medicine in the School. The only other appointment to a full professorship has been the promotion of George Gray Scars to Clinical Professor of Medicine.

Medical School Discoveries.

The year has been remarkable for a series of contributions to medical science made at the School. During the summer and autumn of 1912 Dr. Folin published his discoveries in metabolism, which made a profound impression, and his analysis of the blood in cases of rheumatism and gout; Dr. Mallory, his discovery of the germ of whooping cough; while Dr. Rosenau, with the co-operation of Dr. Richardson of the State Board of Health and Professor Wheeler of the Bussey Institution, ascertained that infantile paralysis was transmitted through a species of stable fly (Stomoxys calcitrans). Enlarging the bounds of knowledge is a function of a university no less essential than imparting it; and in one field are the two more closely connected today than in medicine. Three such discoveries in the course of a single year are, therefore, a deep source of gratification.

Exchange Professorships.

During the year we have been fortunate in our exchange professors, both in those we have received and those we have sent forth. From France came Dr. Charles Dichl, Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Paris; from Germany Dr. Willy Kuekenthal, Professor of Zoology and Director of the Zoological Institute at the University of Breslau. To Berlin we sent Professor Theobald Smith of the Medical School, and to Paris Professor William Morris Davis of the Geological Department. The alliance whereby we are to send annually a member of our staff to lecture for a month at each of four Western colleges, Knox, Beloit, Grinnell, and Colorado, was inaugurated during the second half of the year by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart. Instructors were sent to Harvard by two only of these colleges. They were Walter Houghton Freeman, Instructor in Greek at Grinnell, who acted as Assistant in Greek here; and Elijah Clarence Hill, Head Professor of Romance Languages and Literature of Colorado, who gave an independent course in Spanish-American poetry.

Widener Memorial Library.

The University as a whole rejoices in the munificent offer of a new library building by Mrs. George D. Widener. Gore Hall has long been lamentably insufficient to contain the books on its catalogue. Many thousands of them, in yearly increasing numbers, have been stored in the basements of other buildings, while Gore Hall itself has been far too crowded for a proper use even of the volumes on its shelves. Among the precious lives lost on the "Titanic" was that of Harry Elkins Widener of the class of 1907, a rare collector of rare books. His collection, comprising many editions of great value and interest, he left to his mother, with a request to give it to Harvard when there was a building suitable for the purpose. But Gore Hall was not fireproof, and Mrs. Widener, in view of the conditions, generously determined to build a complete university library on the general interior plan worked out by our committee of architects a year ago, with additional rooms for her son's books in a part of the open court in the centre of the building. These rooms and the volumes they contain are to be under the charge of a special librarian selected by Mrs. Widener, who gives also a fund of $150,000 to care for, and at her discretion to enlarge, the collection. The other parts of the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library will form the four sides of a quadrangle, whereof the northern side, with the main entrance, will cover very nearly the site of the present Gore Hall, and the south front will be about one hundred feet from Massachusetts avenue. The building will contain one large and several smaller reading rooms on the North, and rooms for seminars on the upper floor; while the greater part of the eastern, western and southern sections will be occupied by the stack, in which, however, there will be provided working rooms for professors and a large number of tables separated by glass screens for other readers. Such an arrangement is designed to make the stack as convenient of access as possible to the scholars who use it, so that they may work with all their tools at hand.

Housing our books where they would be safe and could be used during the construction of the new building was no easy problem. It has been solved partly by turning Upper and Lower Massachusetts into reading-rooms; partly by the hospitality of Andover Theological Seminary, which has kindly allowed us to use any vacant space on its shelves; partly by sending appropriate books to various departmental libraries; but chiefly by transferring the students' dining-tables from Randall Hall to Foxcroft, and building temporary stacks for four hundred thousand volumes in the Hall, one of the few fireproof buildings we possess. Although the transfer of the books was made in term-time, it was carried out by Professor Coolidge, the Director of the Library, with such skill that there has been almost no interruption in their use.

Coolidge Memorial Laboratory.

Another important gift of a building has been that of a chemical laboratory by the Hon. T. Jefferson Coolidge in memory of his son, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, Jr., of the class of 1884. This building will be nearly of the same size as the Wolcott Gibbs Laboratory, and will be used for quantitative analysis. It faces Divinity avenue, and will form part of the proposed, and sorely needed, group of chemical laboratories between that avenue and Oxford street. Work upon it had been carried on as rapidly as possible, with the result that by the end of the year 1912 the outer walls were built and the timbers of the root were laid, ensuring its readiness for use before the opening of the next college year.

Other Gifts.

Of the other gifts received the largest have been: that of Mrs. Sage for the Freshman Dormitory; $100,000 from the class of 1887 on its twenty-fifth anniversary; $125,000 from Mr. Edmund Cogswell Converse to found a professorship of Banking in the School of Business Administration; $100,000 from Mrs. Collis P. Huntington for the construction of the Cancer Hospital; $74,285.71 from the estate of Mrs. William O. Moseley for travelling fellowships in the Medical School; $50,000 from the estate of Miss Harrlet E. Goodnow to keep poor students in Harvard College; $50,000 from Mr. George R. Agassiz for the use of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. These and many other benefactions are described more fully in the report of the Treasurer.

Pressing Needs of University.

Recipients of such generosity seem churlish in asking for more, but our needs are ever outrunning out resources, and one of the objects of the annual report is to point them out. There is still a deficit in the University, College and Library account, although for the year 1911-12 it was reduced to $14,750.40. Until it disappears we cannot expect an expansion of those departments that are undermanned, and still less any increase in salaries. That the incomes of professors are inadequate in view of the grade of talent required is generally admitted, and the constant rise in prices has been reducing their purchasing power year by year. One of the most pressing needs is more laboratories for instruction and research in Chemistry, perhaps the most promsing field for scientific investigation and one in which our equipment is still singularly insufficient. Another is an endowment for the Dental School, the imperative need of which was urged in the last report with a reference to the great services rendered to the public by the operating rooms and the sacrifices of the clinical instructors. Still another is the endowment of professorships in the School of Business Administration. One such, in Banking, has been founded as already stated by the generosity of Mr. Converse, but three more are required, and efforts are being made to raise the funds by subscriptions. Every professional school has meant the substitution of thorough instruction in the principles of an art for the slower and less comprehensive process of learning them by apprenticeship; and this School is based on a belief that the principles governing business organization and methods, which have been wrought out in practice by the labor of a generation of expert administrators, can be taught in a way to save the time of the student and make him more efficient. No new professional school, moreover, demonstrates its full value swiftly, and we need not be surprised that most of the students in our School still think a single year of its training sufficient. That the School, however, has already won recognition of its usefulness is proved by the rapid increase in the number of men entering it. During the first few years the progress was naturally slow, but the period of experiment appears to have passed; for the number of first-year students taking full work rose in the autumn of 1912 to 71 as against 45 the year before, and these 71 were graduates of 35 different colleges in all parts of the country.

Friends of the University are trying to raise money for a building for the Department of Music. The sum required to erect the building has been generously offered on condition that $50,000 is subscribed for its maintenance, and this is nearly accomplished. An effort is also being made to enlarge the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in accordance, with the original plan, and the subscriptions for this purpose are well under way. The collections of American ethnology are large and constantly growing, too large already for the building new standing. When the addition is built the University Museum designed by Mr. Agassiz will be complete.

University Press.

The University now possesses several special funds for the publication of books or periodicals on various subjects. These funds in the aggregate are considerably, but there is a growing conviction that a great institution of learning cannot attain its full usefulness without a university press which can publish the writings of its scholars. To that object the special funds now in hand would contribute greatly. Yet it is not enough that certain subjects are provided for. Nor do these funds enable the University to do its own printing. It would be an advantage, and in the long run as economy, if we could collect fonts of type in different languages which a commercial printer can ill afford to buy for the text or notes to an occasional book which may come into his hands. Many of the books issued by a university press would more than pay for themselves. Almost all of them would pay a part of their cost, but some works of great scholarly value yield little and can be published in no other way. If selected by a judicious committee, the publications of such a press would contribute much to the credit of the University, and, what is more important, would stimulate productive scholarship which still lags behind in America. Neither the initial cost of such a press nor the expense of maintenance is very large, but an endowment is absolutely essential if it is to be established. A committee has been appointed to consider the subject and ascertain whether the funds can be procured.

Forms of Useful Gifts.

One word about the form of gifts that will ensure the greatest usefulness. Sometimes benefactors encumber their funds with provisions too inelastic in their application. The object may well be made precise, so that the intent shall be strictly observed; but the best means of attaining that object may vary in the course of time. Permanent funds endure into an indefinite future, and it is not wise to try to be wiser than all posterity. The details of application for the object named may often be left to the sagacity of those who will come hereafter.

In a brief annual report it is impossible even to touch upon all the manifold activities of the University. It is better to confine one's remarks to the matters of most common interest, without intending to imply that other things are of less importance. Nothing has, therefore, been said here of many of our great departments, such as the Observatory, the Arboretum, the Bussey Institution, the Museums, and the laboratories. For these and for more detailed information about the different Faculties and Schools, the Overseers and friends of the University are respectfully referred to the reports of the Deans and Directors which are submitted and printed herewith.

PERCENTAGES OF CONCENTRATION. Language, Literature, Fine Arts, and Music,  30%  32% Natural Sciences,  23%  25% Economics, History, Government,  45%  38% Mathematics and Philosophy,  2%  5%

A few men have been allowed for good reasons to change their field of concentration, but they are not numerous enough to have a material effect upon the percentage. These tables indicate the main subjects of the students' work, but we must remember that they by no means express either the range of studies pursued by the individual student or the amount of instruction given by the several departments, for every undergraduate is obliged to distribute six of his courses among the groups in which his main work does not lie, and he may use his four free courses in the same way.

Oral Examinations.

The oral examinations in French and German, which went into effect for the Class of 1914, required that no student should be registered as a Junior unless he could read one of those languages with fair ease and accuracy. The examinations were held three or four times a year; and the result, as stated in the last annual report, has been that each time about one half of the applicants failed. But the student may work on the language and try until he passes; and the upshot illustrates the general experience that students will rise to any reasonable standard which is seriously required; for by the end of October, 1912, only thirty-three members of the Class of 1914 had failed to pass the examination. Thus the object of the rule has been in large measure attained--that of ensuring among the upper classmen an ability to use books in at least one foreign language.

General Examinations.

In the last annual report the adoption of general examinations in the Medical School, as a substitute for, or supplement to, the passing of a series of separate courses was described, and it was stated that the subject was under consideration in the Divinity School also. A general examination of this character has now been adopted for the degree of Bachelor of Divinity, and for that of Master of Divinity. The latter is a new degree conferred after a year of study, and designed to replace so far as possible the degree of Master of Arts hitherto conferred upon graduate students in the School by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The regulations for these general examinations in the Divinity School, and for the courses of study leading thereto, are printed in an appendix to this report.

The same principle has been discussed in Harvard College. After a year of careful study, the Division of History and Political Science,--comprising the Departments of History, Economics, and Government,--formulated a plan for a general examination before graduation of students concentrating in these subjects. The plan, which was brought before the Faculty this autumn, was adopted after debate in three meetings, and has since been approved by the governing boards. It lays down briefly the general principles, and, together with the outline of this plan prepared by the Division, will be found in a second appendix to this report.

In describing the general examinations for the Medical School something was said of the principle on which they are based; but the subject merits fuller treatment, because it involves a more radical change in American educational practice than anything the University has done for many years. It means a change not so much in machinery as in object; not of methods alone, but of the point of view. So far as I am aware, general examinations of some kind exist in all European universities, except for a degree with a mere pass in Scotland and the provincial universities of England. They have been used in the past in American colleges. In a very crude form they were at one time prescribed for graduation from Harvard; and in some other colleges they lasted until after the middle of the last century. Since the curriculum of those colleges comprised many subjects, the examination, which covered them all, was open to the criticism now heard of the general examination for graduation from the German Gymnasium. It was almost of necessity a review of unconnected studies; an effort of memory, preceded by a strenuous cram. But whether in such a test the disadvantages outweigh the benefits or not, it was quite inapplicable after the elective system had been adopted in a thorough-going form at Harvard and more or less completely by other colleges. The student being allowed to select as he pleased among all the courses of instruction offered by the Faculty, a general examination would have covered a different ground for each student; would have been merely a repetition of the examinations in separate courses which the student had already passed; and could not have required reading outside of the courses, or demanded a correlation of information obtained in courses in diverse fields. But now that every student is obliged to take six courses in some one field, the situation has changed, and the way is open for this valuable instrument of education in that field. To the courses distributed among other subjects it is still inapplicable; but in the field of the student's concentration his attention can be directed, as it should be, to the subject pursued, rather than to the particular courses taken, which then become not ends in themselves but only efficient means to an end. By examinations well devised for the purpose the student can be made to reflect upon the subject as a whole, correlating the several parts; and the interest of an intelligent man follows his efforts. Moreover, he can be induced to read books outside the strict limits of his courses in order to fill in the gaps; for the habit of independent reading has fallen sadly out of use among undergraduates at the present day.

Drawbacks of Plan.

A general examination has drawbacks as well as merits. If it tends to fix attention on a subject wider than any single course, it tends also to make the passing of that examination the goal, and to lessen interest in matters unlikely to appear there; and hence, unskillfully used, it may lead to the cramming of information by expert tutors without serious effort to master the subject. But if skillfully used, it may be made a powerful instrument for promoting co-ordination of knowledge, a broad comprehension of the subject, a grasp of underlying principles instead of memory of detached facts, and in some subjects may provide an incentive to intellectual effort such as no other type of examination can offer.

The benefits to be gained from a general examination are not needed equally in all fields of learning. In some subjects, like Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry, every advanced course must require familiarity with the principles taught in the more elementary ones, so that an examination in the higher branches measures fairly well the command of the whole subject. In other departments, notably History, there is little natural sequence, and a student may in his Senior year pass an excellent examination in a course on Europe in the nineteenth century although he has completely forgotten the American history he studied as a Sophomore,--and yet the events on the two sides of the Atlantic are intimately related parts of one movement in human progress. The general examination may well be applied, therefore, in one field while it is not in another; and the Faculty has been wise in allowing one division to adopt the plan without requiring uniformity in all.

If the general examination stood alone, the optimism of many undergraduates would lead them to postpone preparation until the time drew near, and then it would be too late. This could be justified only on the assumption that the function of the College was limited to providing earnest men with opportunities for education, probably with the result, witnessed in the German universities, that a large part of the students would make no attempt to obtain or earn a degree. No one would advocate such a plan for undergraduates here. American colleges must strive to form character, to induce habits of diligence; and they must do so all the more because, unlike the German universities, they are not groups of professional schools with the stimulus of direct preparation for one's career in life. It is not proposed, therefore, to abandon examinations in the several courses except so far as they occur at the same time as the general examination. Moreover, if the student is expected to study a subject, to regard his courses as means rather than ends, to do some outside reading, he must have special guidance beyond that which is provided in the courses he takes. There must be tutors, not unlike those at the English universities, who confer with the students frequently, not about their work in courses alone, but also about their outside reading and their preparation for the final test that lies before them. Tutors of this kind are an integral and necessary factor in the plan. To provide them will require money, part of which has been promised, while the rest must be sought from friends of the College; and the benefit to the students is well worth the expense involved. The great advantage for the average student of a general examination upon his principal field of study, lies in forcing him to correlate what he has studied, to keep it in mind as a body of connected learning, to fill in gaps by reading, to appreciate that all true education must be in great part self-education, a personal effort to advance on the difficult path of knowledge, not a half-reluctant transportation through college in perambulators pushed by instructors.

No one in close touch with American education has failed to deplore the lack among the mass of undergraduates of keen interest in their studies, the small regard for scholarly attainment; and a general examination upon a field of concentration seems to offer the most promising means of improvement. It was the method adopted in England a hundred years ago. The class tests at Oxford based on general public examinations began in 1802, and five years later they were divided into the Honour Schools of Literae Humaniores and Mathematics and Physics. The Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge began in 1747, the Civil Law Classes in 1815, the Classical Tripos in 1824. The other triposes at Cambridge and Honour Schools at Oxford were established at various dates after the middle of the nineteenth century. The effect in stimulating interest in scholarship and respect for high rank was rapid, profound, and permanent. Success in the examinations has been universally accepted as a test of ability and a gateway to the careers entered by Oxford and Cambridge men. The failure of American undergraduates, and, following their lead, of the American public at large, to value excellence in college scholarship is due in part, as the students themselves declare, to the fact that rank in courses depends upon the varying standards maintained by different instructors. It is due also to a sincere doubt whether one who can accumulate the largest number of high marks in short stretches of work is really the ablest man. Much must be ascribed, moreover, to the absence of competition on a large scale. So long as college men are all trading separate paths, crossing at many points but never leading to a common goal there can be little of that conviction of superior qualities which attached to the man who succeeds in achieving what many others are striving for. A well-ordered general examination avoids all of these imperfections, for it provides a uniform standard, a competitive test and a run long enough to call out the whole power of the man. The stimulus is not only good for those who hope to win high distinction, but will tend also to leaven the whole mass.

Control of Athletics.

To turn from studies to athletics is to leave a region where competition has been neglected for one where it has been carried to an extreme by the students themselves. The prevailing interest in athletic sports has done much for so-briefly and cleanliness of life in college, but the vast scale of the public games has brought its problems. They have long ceased to be an undergraduate diversion, managed entirely by the students, and maintained by their subscriptions. They have become great spectacles supported by the sale of tickets to thousands of people; while experience has proved that skilful coaching will determine the victory between teams of approximately equal strength. The result has been an enormous growth in expenditure until the authorities have felt compelled to take part in supervising it. The experiment of control by an Athletic Committee composed of three members of the Faculty and three graduates appointed by the Governing Boards, and three undergraduates selected by the captains of the teams, has brought improvement. Extravagence has been curtailed; but, with a revenue of about two hundred thousand dollars a year, money comes easily and is easily spend under the spur of intense public interest in the result of the major contests, and a little laxity quickly leads to grave abuse. Extravagance still exists and vigilant supervision is required to reduce it. Graduates, who form public opinion on these matters, must realize that intercollegiate victories are not the most important objects of college education. Nor must they forget the need of physical training for the mass of students by neglecting to encourage the efforts recently made to cultivate healthful sports among men who have no prospect of playing on the college teams.

Freshman Dormitories.

The promotion of a better college life, physical, intellectual and moral, has received much attention of late among men engaged in education. At Harvard we believe that a vital matter is to launch the student aright on the new freedom of college life by means of Freshman dormitories; and it is a pleasure to state that enough money has been subscribed to build three out of the four buildings projected. These three will house over four hundred and fifty students, or by far the greater part of the present Freshman class that does not live at home. One of them will be paid for by the bequest of the late George Smith, left to the College many years ago to accumulate until it reached the sum required to build a group of three dormitories of the collective size of one of the quadrangles designed. Another has been generously given by Mrs. Russell Sage, and at her reqpest will be named Standish Hall. The third is provided by a large number of subscriptions from alumni and others. The project will not be complete until the fourth is given, but the erection of the first three will be begun early in the coming year, as soon as the working plans, now progressing rapidly, have been completed. One of the quadrangles will be on Boylston street, behind the Power House, while the others will be built farther to the east along the parkway as far as De Wolf street. Their buildings will stand on three sides of quadrangles, the fourth side facing the river being open to the south. The architect, Mr. Charles A. Coolidge, has adapted to the purpose with great skill the colonial style of the older buildings in the College Yard.

People not very familiar with the progress of the plan have expressed a fear that the Freshmen would be treated like boys at boarding school; but that would defeat the very object in view, of teaching them to use sensibly the large liberty of college life. Liberty is taught to young men not by regulations, but by its exercise in a proper environment. The vital matter is the atmosphere and the traditions in which the youth is placed on entering college. At present he is too much enchained in a narrow set of friends who copy one another, not always wisely, and come too little into contact with the broadening influences of the college community as a whole. Hence he fails to see how much he can get out of college life, or finds it out too late to reap the full benefit thereof. The Seniors show their appreciation of all this by rooming together in the Yard, but they end where they should have begun.

Graduate School of Applied Science.

In the School of Applied Science important changes have taken place during the year. A number of technical courses have been removed from the list open to undergraduates, carrying forward the design of placing the School on a graduate basis. At the same time the plan of instruction has been modified and made more intensive in method, so that a college graduate without technical preparation can be taught his Engineering, Mining, or Architecture in the shortest possible period. No doubt it will take time for the community to learn that a man who hopes to rise high in his profession gains in the end by a college education preceding his technical studies. Engineering ought to stand among the liberal professions which are enriched by a general education, and in fact the number of college men who enter engineering schools, though still small, is increasing year by year.

The organization of the School has also been altered. At the suggestion of the instructors, the departments have been formed into Schools of Engineering, of Mining and Metallurgy, of Architecture and so forth, each under a Council of instructors, the whole being grouped under a new and distinct Faculty of Applied Science. This has the double advantage of giving the Schools a more strictly professional tone under the government of a body devoted wholly to their interests, and of relieving the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of questions hardly germane to its regular work. The new organization nominally went into effect in September, 1912, but in fact the Faculty of Applied Science began its services in the year covered by this report, and its members are glad to work out their common problems in a meeting of this kind.

The Graduate Schools of Applied Science possess an admirable staff of professors, and already in some directions excellent equipment, but as yet few students, for the reputation in the profession which fills the classes is naturally of slow growth. It cannot be stimulated rapidly, and depends upon the achievements of the men that the institution has produced. These are the principal means of recruiting fresh students for any school, and years must always pass before their influence in the community is strongly felt.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Since the last report was written the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has decided, at the request of great numbers of our fellow citizens, to erect its new buildings in Cambridge, and this brings home to us the question whether some co-operation between the two institutions is not possible in the training of students who are graduates of colleges or technical schools. That would not trench upon the principal field of the Institute of Technology, while it would add greatly in the efficiency of training college graduates, to whose needs the curriculum provided for boys coming from high schools is imperfectly adapted. The number of such college graduates is, and for an indefinite time to come will be, far too small to justify two separate schools; and that is even more true of the men who, after finishing the regular technical course, want to pursue advanced work. To maintain two distinct plants, fully staffed and equipped, for the teaching of an insufficient number of students in the most expensive of all kinds of education is not only a waste of educational resources, but entails an even more pitiful loss of efficiency. The momentum obtained by a combined effort would be far greater than that of two separate schools striving singly for the same object. No plan of co-operation has been devised, but the difficulties ought not to be insuperable if approached with mutual good will and a sense that an educational institution does not exist solely for its own glory, but as a means to a larger end.

The Law School.

Some comment was aroused by the decline in the number of students in the Law School at the opening of the term of October, 1912; but this is due, as the Dean explains in his report, not to the size of the entering class, which is substantially as large as ever, but to raising the standard for continuing in the School in the case of men whose work has been defective. Since the School has grown larger it has become both possible and necessary to insist on thoroughly satisfactory work by all students who attend the classes and who by their very presence affect the standard. The number of graduates of Harvard College who enter the School has, indeed, fallen of late years; but, this, as the elaborate report of the National Bureau of Education on the occupation of college graduates shows, is part of a general movement which is felt most promptly at Harvard. To inquire into its causes would not be possible here. It is enough to point out that the occupations in which college men engage have enlarged greatly, and the attractions of business life have grown stronger. The report of the Bureau, with its diagrams of historic changes in the proportion of graduates following different vocations, is highly interesting.

Graduate School of Medicine.

The year has been marked in the Medical School by the appointment of two new deans. That of Dr. Bradford as Dean of the School has already been mentioned. The other office is new. For many years courses of instruction, both clinical and in the laboratories, have been offered for the benefit of physicians and surgeons in active practice. A large part of these have been included in the Medical Summer School, while others have been given in term-time. The science and art of medicine are advancing so rapidly that many practitioners are glad of opportunities to gain a greater familiarity with recent methods than they can get from medical journals alone; and the Faculty felt that instruction of this character could profitably be made more systematic. A Graduate School of Medicine has, therefore, been created, with a separate dean and administrative board, and to some extent an additional staff of instructors, although not a distinct Faculty. Dr. Horace David Arnold has been appointed Dean; and the School opened its courses in October, 1912, with a very promising registration.

Hospitals.

Reference has been made on a preceding page and in former reports to the closer relations between the Medical School and the different hospitals. The central factor in the movement is the alliance with the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, situated opposite the main entrance to the School. The buildings are nearly completed, and will be ready for the first patients in a few weeks. In accordance with the arrangement for a joint selection of the staff of the Hospital and instructors in the School. Dr. Christian, our Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine, is the Physician-in-Chief of the Hospital, and Dr. Harvey Cushing, formerly of Johns Hopkins University, is Surgeon-in-Chief and has taken his chair as Moseley Professor of Surgery at the School. The other members of the staff have been selected by mutual understanding.

Notable also in the history of the School have been the opening of the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital for Cancer in close co-operation with the School, and the calling for the first time of a non-resident to a chair in the School and a leading position on the staff of the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. David Linn Edsall, formerly of the University of Pennsylvania and later of Washington University at St. Louis, was appointed chief of one of the two continuous medical services at the Hospital and Jackson Professor of Clinical Medicine in the School. The only other appointment to a full professorship has been the promotion of George Gray Scars to Clinical Professor of Medicine.

Medical School Discoveries.

The year has been remarkable for a series of contributions to medical science made at the School. During the summer and autumn of 1912 Dr. Folin published his discoveries in metabolism, which made a profound impression, and his analysis of the blood in cases of rheumatism and gout; Dr. Mallory, his discovery of the germ of whooping cough; while Dr. Rosenau, with the co-operation of Dr. Richardson of the State Board of Health and Professor Wheeler of the Bussey Institution, ascertained that infantile paralysis was transmitted through a species of stable fly (Stomoxys calcitrans). Enlarging the bounds of knowledge is a function of a university no less essential than imparting it; and in one field are the two more closely connected today than in medicine. Three such discoveries in the course of a single year are, therefore, a deep source of gratification.

Exchange Professorships.

During the year we have been fortunate in our exchange professors, both in those we have received and those we have sent forth. From France came Dr. Charles Dichl, Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Paris; from Germany Dr. Willy Kuekenthal, Professor of Zoology and Director of the Zoological Institute at the University of Breslau. To Berlin we sent Professor Theobald Smith of the Medical School, and to Paris Professor William Morris Davis of the Geological Department. The alliance whereby we are to send annually a member of our staff to lecture for a month at each of four Western colleges, Knox, Beloit, Grinnell, and Colorado, was inaugurated during the second half of the year by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart. Instructors were sent to Harvard by two only of these colleges. They were Walter Houghton Freeman, Instructor in Greek at Grinnell, who acted as Assistant in Greek here; and Elijah Clarence Hill, Head Professor of Romance Languages and Literature of Colorado, who gave an independent course in Spanish-American poetry.

Widener Memorial Library.

The University as a whole rejoices in the munificent offer of a new library building by Mrs. George D. Widener. Gore Hall has long been lamentably insufficient to contain the books on its catalogue. Many thousands of them, in yearly increasing numbers, have been stored in the basements of other buildings, while Gore Hall itself has been far too crowded for a proper use even of the volumes on its shelves. Among the precious lives lost on the "Titanic" was that of Harry Elkins Widener of the class of 1907, a rare collector of rare books. His collection, comprising many editions of great value and interest, he left to his mother, with a request to give it to Harvard when there was a building suitable for the purpose. But Gore Hall was not fireproof, and Mrs. Widener, in view of the conditions, generously determined to build a complete university library on the general interior plan worked out by our committee of architects a year ago, with additional rooms for her son's books in a part of the open court in the centre of the building. These rooms and the volumes they contain are to be under the charge of a special librarian selected by Mrs. Widener, who gives also a fund of $150,000 to care for, and at her discretion to enlarge, the collection. The other parts of the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library will form the four sides of a quadrangle, whereof the northern side, with the main entrance, will cover very nearly the site of the present Gore Hall, and the south front will be about one hundred feet from Massachusetts avenue. The building will contain one large and several smaller reading rooms on the North, and rooms for seminars on the upper floor; while the greater part of the eastern, western and southern sections will be occupied by the stack, in which, however, there will be provided working rooms for professors and a large number of tables separated by glass screens for other readers. Such an arrangement is designed to make the stack as convenient of access as possible to the scholars who use it, so that they may work with all their tools at hand.

Housing our books where they would be safe and could be used during the construction of the new building was no easy problem. It has been solved partly by turning Upper and Lower Massachusetts into reading-rooms; partly by the hospitality of Andover Theological Seminary, which has kindly allowed us to use any vacant space on its shelves; partly by sending appropriate books to various departmental libraries; but chiefly by transferring the students' dining-tables from Randall Hall to Foxcroft, and building temporary stacks for four hundred thousand volumes in the Hall, one of the few fireproof buildings we possess. Although the transfer of the books was made in term-time, it was carried out by Professor Coolidge, the Director of the Library, with such skill that there has been almost no interruption in their use.

Coolidge Memorial Laboratory.

Another important gift of a building has been that of a chemical laboratory by the Hon. T. Jefferson Coolidge in memory of his son, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, Jr., of the class of 1884. This building will be nearly of the same size as the Wolcott Gibbs Laboratory, and will be used for quantitative analysis. It faces Divinity avenue, and will form part of the proposed, and sorely needed, group of chemical laboratories between that avenue and Oxford street. Work upon it had been carried on as rapidly as possible, with the result that by the end of the year 1912 the outer walls were built and the timbers of the root were laid, ensuring its readiness for use before the opening of the next college year.

Other Gifts.

Of the other gifts received the largest have been: that of Mrs. Sage for the Freshman Dormitory; $100,000 from the class of 1887 on its twenty-fifth anniversary; $125,000 from Mr. Edmund Cogswell Converse to found a professorship of Banking in the School of Business Administration; $100,000 from Mrs. Collis P. Huntington for the construction of the Cancer Hospital; $74,285.71 from the estate of Mrs. William O. Moseley for travelling fellowships in the Medical School; $50,000 from the estate of Miss Harrlet E. Goodnow to keep poor students in Harvard College; $50,000 from Mr. George R. Agassiz for the use of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. These and many other benefactions are described more fully in the report of the Treasurer.

Pressing Needs of University.

Recipients of such generosity seem churlish in asking for more, but our needs are ever outrunning out resources, and one of the objects of the annual report is to point them out. There is still a deficit in the University, College and Library account, although for the year 1911-12 it was reduced to $14,750.40. Until it disappears we cannot expect an expansion of those departments that are undermanned, and still less any increase in salaries. That the incomes of professors are inadequate in view of the grade of talent required is generally admitted, and the constant rise in prices has been reducing their purchasing power year by year. One of the most pressing needs is more laboratories for instruction and research in Chemistry, perhaps the most promsing field for scientific investigation and one in which our equipment is still singularly insufficient. Another is an endowment for the Dental School, the imperative need of which was urged in the last report with a reference to the great services rendered to the public by the operating rooms and the sacrifices of the clinical instructors. Still another is the endowment of professorships in the School of Business Administration. One such, in Banking, has been founded as already stated by the generosity of Mr. Converse, but three more are required, and efforts are being made to raise the funds by subscriptions. Every professional school has meant the substitution of thorough instruction in the principles of an art for the slower and less comprehensive process of learning them by apprenticeship; and this School is based on a belief that the principles governing business organization and methods, which have been wrought out in practice by the labor of a generation of expert administrators, can be taught in a way to save the time of the student and make him more efficient. No new professional school, moreover, demonstrates its full value swiftly, and we need not be surprised that most of the students in our School still think a single year of its training sufficient. That the School, however, has already won recognition of its usefulness is proved by the rapid increase in the number of men entering it. During the first few years the progress was naturally slow, but the period of experiment appears to have passed; for the number of first-year students taking full work rose in the autumn of 1912 to 71 as against 45 the year before, and these 71 were graduates of 35 different colleges in all parts of the country.

Friends of the University are trying to raise money for a building for the Department of Music. The sum required to erect the building has been generously offered on condition that $50,000 is subscribed for its maintenance, and this is nearly accomplished. An effort is also being made to enlarge the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in accordance, with the original plan, and the subscriptions for this purpose are well under way. The collections of American ethnology are large and constantly growing, too large already for the building new standing. When the addition is built the University Museum designed by Mr. Agassiz will be complete.

University Press.

The University now possesses several special funds for the publication of books or periodicals on various subjects. These funds in the aggregate are considerably, but there is a growing conviction that a great institution of learning cannot attain its full usefulness without a university press which can publish the writings of its scholars. To that object the special funds now in hand would contribute greatly. Yet it is not enough that certain subjects are provided for. Nor do these funds enable the University to do its own printing. It would be an advantage, and in the long run as economy, if we could collect fonts of type in different languages which a commercial printer can ill afford to buy for the text or notes to an occasional book which may come into his hands. Many of the books issued by a university press would more than pay for themselves. Almost all of them would pay a part of their cost, but some works of great scholarly value yield little and can be published in no other way. If selected by a judicious committee, the publications of such a press would contribute much to the credit of the University, and, what is more important, would stimulate productive scholarship which still lags behind in America. Neither the initial cost of such a press nor the expense of maintenance is very large, but an endowment is absolutely essential if it is to be established. A committee has been appointed to consider the subject and ascertain whether the funds can be procured.

Forms of Useful Gifts.

One word about the form of gifts that will ensure the greatest usefulness. Sometimes benefactors encumber their funds with provisions too inelastic in their application. The object may well be made precise, so that the intent shall be strictly observed; but the best means of attaining that object may vary in the course of time. Permanent funds endure into an indefinite future, and it is not wise to try to be wiser than all posterity. The details of application for the object named may often be left to the sagacity of those who will come hereafter.

In a brief annual report it is impossible even to touch upon all the manifold activities of the University. It is better to confine one's remarks to the matters of most common interest, without intending to imply that other things are of less importance. Nothing has, therefore, been said here of many of our great departments, such as the Observatory, the Arboretum, the Bussey Institution, the Museums, and the laboratories. For these and for more detailed information about the different Faculties and Schools, the Overseers and friends of the University are respectfully referred to the reports of the Deans and Directors which are submitted and printed herewith.

A few men have been allowed for good reasons to change their field of concentration, but they are not numerous enough to have a material effect upon the percentage. These tables indicate the main subjects of the students' work, but we must remember that they by no means express either the range of studies pursued by the individual student or the amount of instruction given by the several departments, for every undergraduate is obliged to distribute six of his courses among the groups in which his main work does not lie, and he may use his four free courses in the same way.

Oral Examinations.

The oral examinations in French and German, which went into effect for the Class of 1914, required that no student should be registered as a Junior unless he could read one of those languages with fair ease and accuracy. The examinations were held three or four times a year; and the result, as stated in the last annual report, has been that each time about one half of the applicants failed. But the student may work on the language and try until he passes; and the upshot illustrates the general experience that students will rise to any reasonable standard which is seriously required; for by the end of October, 1912, only thirty-three members of the Class of 1914 had failed to pass the examination. Thus the object of the rule has been in large measure attained--that of ensuring among the upper classmen an ability to use books in at least one foreign language.

General Examinations.

In the last annual report the adoption of general examinations in the Medical School, as a substitute for, or supplement to, the passing of a series of separate courses was described, and it was stated that the subject was under consideration in the Divinity School also. A general examination of this character has now been adopted for the degree of Bachelor of Divinity, and for that of Master of Divinity. The latter is a new degree conferred after a year of study, and designed to replace so far as possible the degree of Master of Arts hitherto conferred upon graduate students in the School by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The regulations for these general examinations in the Divinity School, and for the courses of study leading thereto, are printed in an appendix to this report.

The same principle has been discussed in Harvard College. After a year of careful study, the Division of History and Political Science,--comprising the Departments of History, Economics, and Government,--formulated a plan for a general examination before graduation of students concentrating in these subjects. The plan, which was brought before the Faculty this autumn, was adopted after debate in three meetings, and has since been approved by the governing boards. It lays down briefly the general principles, and, together with the outline of this plan prepared by the Division, will be found in a second appendix to this report.

In describing the general examinations for the Medical School something was said of the principle on which they are based; but the subject merits fuller treatment, because it involves a more radical change in American educational practice than anything the University has done for many years. It means a change not so much in machinery as in object; not of methods alone, but of the point of view. So far as I am aware, general examinations of some kind exist in all European universities, except for a degree with a mere pass in Scotland and the provincial universities of England. They have been used in the past in American colleges. In a very crude form they were at one time prescribed for graduation from Harvard; and in some other colleges they lasted until after the middle of the last century. Since the curriculum of those colleges comprised many subjects, the examination, which covered them all, was open to the criticism now heard of the general examination for graduation from the German Gymnasium. It was almost of necessity a review of unconnected studies; an effort of memory, preceded by a strenuous cram. But whether in such a test the disadvantages outweigh the benefits or not, it was quite inapplicable after the elective system had been adopted in a thorough-going form at Harvard and more or less completely by other colleges. The student being allowed to select as he pleased among all the courses of instruction offered by the Faculty, a general examination would have covered a different ground for each student; would have been merely a repetition of the examinations in separate courses which the student had already passed; and could not have required reading outside of the courses, or demanded a correlation of information obtained in courses in diverse fields. But now that every student is obliged to take six courses in some one field, the situation has changed, and the way is open for this valuable instrument of education in that field. To the courses distributed among other subjects it is still inapplicable; but in the field of the student's concentration his attention can be directed, as it should be, to the subject pursued, rather than to the particular courses taken, which then become not ends in themselves but only efficient means to an end. By examinations well devised for the purpose the student can be made to reflect upon the subject as a whole, correlating the several parts; and the interest of an intelligent man follows his efforts. Moreover, he can be induced to read books outside the strict limits of his courses in order to fill in the gaps; for the habit of independent reading has fallen sadly out of use among undergraduates at the present day.

Drawbacks of Plan.

A general examination has drawbacks as well as merits. If it tends to fix attention on a subject wider than any single course, it tends also to make the passing of that examination the goal, and to lessen interest in matters unlikely to appear there; and hence, unskillfully used, it may lead to the cramming of information by expert tutors without serious effort to master the subject. But if skillfully used, it may be made a powerful instrument for promoting co-ordination of knowledge, a broad comprehension of the subject, a grasp of underlying principles instead of memory of detached facts, and in some subjects may provide an incentive to intellectual effort such as no other type of examination can offer.

The benefits to be gained from a general examination are not needed equally in all fields of learning. In some subjects, like Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry, every advanced course must require familiarity with the principles taught in the more elementary ones, so that an examination in the higher branches measures fairly well the command of the whole subject. In other departments, notably History, there is little natural sequence, and a student may in his Senior year pass an excellent examination in a course on Europe in the nineteenth century although he has completely forgotten the American history he studied as a Sophomore,--and yet the events on the two sides of the Atlantic are intimately related parts of one movement in human progress. The general examination may well be applied, therefore, in one field while it is not in another; and the Faculty has been wise in allowing one division to adopt the plan without requiring uniformity in all.

If the general examination stood alone, the optimism of many undergraduates would lead them to postpone preparation until the time drew near, and then it would be too late. This could be justified only on the assumption that the function of the College was limited to providing earnest men with opportunities for education, probably with the result, witnessed in the German universities, that a large part of the students would make no attempt to obtain or earn a degree. No one would advocate such a plan for undergraduates here. American colleges must strive to form character, to induce habits of diligence; and they must do so all the more because, unlike the German universities, they are not groups of professional schools with the stimulus of direct preparation for one's career in life. It is not proposed, therefore, to abandon examinations in the several courses except so far as they occur at the same time as the general examination. Moreover, if the student is expected to study a subject, to regard his courses as means rather than ends, to do some outside reading, he must have special guidance beyond that which is provided in the courses he takes. There must be tutors, not unlike those at the English universities, who confer with the students frequently, not about their work in courses alone, but also about their outside reading and their preparation for the final test that lies before them. Tutors of this kind are an integral and necessary factor in the plan. To provide them will require money, part of which has been promised, while the rest must be sought from friends of the College; and the benefit to the students is well worth the expense involved. The great advantage for the average student of a general examination upon his principal field of study, lies in forcing him to correlate what he has studied, to keep it in mind as a body of connected learning, to fill in gaps by reading, to appreciate that all true education must be in great part self-education, a personal effort to advance on the difficult path of knowledge, not a half-reluctant transportation through college in perambulators pushed by instructors.

No one in close touch with American education has failed to deplore the lack among the mass of undergraduates of keen interest in their studies, the small regard for scholarly attainment; and a general examination upon a field of concentration seems to offer the most promising means of improvement. It was the method adopted in England a hundred years ago. The class tests at Oxford based on general public examinations began in 1802, and five years later they were divided into the Honour Schools of Literae Humaniores and Mathematics and Physics. The Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge began in 1747, the Civil Law Classes in 1815, the Classical Tripos in 1824. The other triposes at Cambridge and Honour Schools at Oxford were established at various dates after the middle of the nineteenth century. The effect in stimulating interest in scholarship and respect for high rank was rapid, profound, and permanent. Success in the examinations has been universally accepted as a test of ability and a gateway to the careers entered by Oxford and Cambridge men. The failure of American undergraduates, and, following their lead, of the American public at large, to value excellence in college scholarship is due in part, as the students themselves declare, to the fact that rank in courses depends upon the varying standards maintained by different instructors. It is due also to a sincere doubt whether one who can accumulate the largest number of high marks in short stretches of work is really the ablest man. Much must be ascribed, moreover, to the absence of competition on a large scale. So long as college men are all trading separate paths, crossing at many points but never leading to a common goal there can be little of that conviction of superior qualities which attached to the man who succeeds in achieving what many others are striving for. A well-ordered general examination avoids all of these imperfections, for it provides a uniform standard, a competitive test and a run long enough to call out the whole power of the man. The stimulus is not only good for those who hope to win high distinction, but will tend also to leaven the whole mass.

Control of Athletics.

To turn from studies to athletics is to leave a region where competition has been neglected for one where it has been carried to an extreme by the students themselves. The prevailing interest in athletic sports has done much for so-briefly and cleanliness of life in college, but the vast scale of the public games has brought its problems. They have long ceased to be an undergraduate diversion, managed entirely by the students, and maintained by their subscriptions. They have become great spectacles supported by the sale of tickets to thousands of people; while experience has proved that skilful coaching will determine the victory between teams of approximately equal strength. The result has been an enormous growth in expenditure until the authorities have felt compelled to take part in supervising it. The experiment of control by an Athletic Committee composed of three members of the Faculty and three graduates appointed by the Governing Boards, and three undergraduates selected by the captains of the teams, has brought improvement. Extravagence has been curtailed; but, with a revenue of about two hundred thousand dollars a year, money comes easily and is easily spend under the spur of intense public interest in the result of the major contests, and a little laxity quickly leads to grave abuse. Extravagance still exists and vigilant supervision is required to reduce it. Graduates, who form public opinion on these matters, must realize that intercollegiate victories are not the most important objects of college education. Nor must they forget the need of physical training for the mass of students by neglecting to encourage the efforts recently made to cultivate healthful sports among men who have no prospect of playing on the college teams.

Freshman Dormitories.

The promotion of a better college life, physical, intellectual and moral, has received much attention of late among men engaged in education. At Harvard we believe that a vital matter is to launch the student aright on the new freedom of college life by means of Freshman dormitories; and it is a pleasure to state that enough money has been subscribed to build three out of the four buildings projected. These three will house over four hundred and fifty students, or by far the greater part of the present Freshman class that does not live at home. One of them will be paid for by the bequest of the late George Smith, left to the College many years ago to accumulate until it reached the sum required to build a group of three dormitories of the collective size of one of the quadrangles designed. Another has been generously given by Mrs. Russell Sage, and at her reqpest will be named Standish Hall. The third is provided by a large number of subscriptions from alumni and others. The project will not be complete until the fourth is given, but the erection of the first three will be begun early in the coming year, as soon as the working plans, now progressing rapidly, have been completed. One of the quadrangles will be on Boylston street, behind the Power House, while the others will be built farther to the east along the parkway as far as De Wolf street. Their buildings will stand on three sides of quadrangles, the fourth side facing the river being open to the south. The architect, Mr. Charles A. Coolidge, has adapted to the purpose with great skill the colonial style of the older buildings in the College Yard.

People not very familiar with the progress of the plan have expressed a fear that the Freshmen would be treated like boys at boarding school; but that would defeat the very object in view, of teaching them to use sensibly the large liberty of college life. Liberty is taught to young men not by regulations, but by its exercise in a proper environment. The vital matter is the atmosphere and the traditions in which the youth is placed on entering college. At present he is too much enchained in a narrow set of friends who copy one another, not always wisely, and come too little into contact with the broadening influences of the college community as a whole. Hence he fails to see how much he can get out of college life, or finds it out too late to reap the full benefit thereof. The Seniors show their appreciation of all this by rooming together in the Yard, but they end where they should have begun.

Graduate School of Applied Science.

In the School of Applied Science important changes have taken place during the year. A number of technical courses have been removed from the list open to undergraduates, carrying forward the design of placing the School on a graduate basis. At the same time the plan of instruction has been modified and made more intensive in method, so that a college graduate without technical preparation can be taught his Engineering, Mining, or Architecture in the shortest possible period. No doubt it will take time for the community to learn that a man who hopes to rise high in his profession gains in the end by a college education preceding his technical studies. Engineering ought to stand among the liberal professions which are enriched by a general education, and in fact the number of college men who enter engineering schools, though still small, is increasing year by year.

The organization of the School has also been altered. At the suggestion of the instructors, the departments have been formed into Schools of Engineering, of Mining and Metallurgy, of Architecture and so forth, each under a Council of instructors, the whole being grouped under a new and distinct Faculty of Applied Science. This has the double advantage of giving the Schools a more strictly professional tone under the government of a body devoted wholly to their interests, and of relieving the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of questions hardly germane to its regular work. The new organization nominally went into effect in September, 1912, but in fact the Faculty of Applied Science began its services in the year covered by this report, and its members are glad to work out their common problems in a meeting of this kind.

The Graduate Schools of Applied Science possess an admirable staff of professors, and already in some directions excellent equipment, but as yet few students, for the reputation in the profession which fills the classes is naturally of slow growth. It cannot be stimulated rapidly, and depends upon the achievements of the men that the institution has produced. These are the principal means of recruiting fresh students for any school, and years must always pass before their influence in the community is strongly felt.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Since the last report was written the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has decided, at the request of great numbers of our fellow citizens, to erect its new buildings in Cambridge, and this brings home to us the question whether some co-operation between the two institutions is not possible in the training of students who are graduates of colleges or technical schools. That would not trench upon the principal field of the Institute of Technology, while it would add greatly in the efficiency of training college graduates, to whose needs the curriculum provided for boys coming from high schools is imperfectly adapted. The number of such college graduates is, and for an indefinite time to come will be, far too small to justify two separate schools; and that is even more true of the men who, after finishing the regular technical course, want to pursue advanced work. To maintain two distinct plants, fully staffed and equipped, for the teaching of an insufficient number of students in the most expensive of all kinds of education is not only a waste of educational resources, but entails an even more pitiful loss of efficiency. The momentum obtained by a combined effort would be far greater than that of two separate schools striving singly for the same object. No plan of co-operation has been devised, but the difficulties ought not to be insuperable if approached with mutual good will and a sense that an educational institution does not exist solely for its own glory, but as a means to a larger end.

The Law School.

Some comment was aroused by the decline in the number of students in the Law School at the opening of the term of October, 1912; but this is due, as the Dean explains in his report, not to the size of the entering class, which is substantially as large as ever, but to raising the standard for continuing in the School in the case of men whose work has been defective. Since the School has grown larger it has become both possible and necessary to insist on thoroughly satisfactory work by all students who attend the classes and who by their very presence affect the standard. The number of graduates of Harvard College who enter the School has, indeed, fallen of late years; but, this, as the elaborate report of the National Bureau of Education on the occupation of college graduates shows, is part of a general movement which is felt most promptly at Harvard. To inquire into its causes would not be possible here. It is enough to point out that the occupations in which college men engage have enlarged greatly, and the attractions of business life have grown stronger. The report of the Bureau, with its diagrams of historic changes in the proportion of graduates following different vocations, is highly interesting.

Graduate School of Medicine.

The year has been marked in the Medical School by the appointment of two new deans. That of Dr. Bradford as Dean of the School has already been mentioned. The other office is new. For many years courses of instruction, both clinical and in the laboratories, have been offered for the benefit of physicians and surgeons in active practice. A large part of these have been included in the Medical Summer School, while others have been given in term-time. The science and art of medicine are advancing so rapidly that many practitioners are glad of opportunities to gain a greater familiarity with recent methods than they can get from medical journals alone; and the Faculty felt that instruction of this character could profitably be made more systematic. A Graduate School of Medicine has, therefore, been created, with a separate dean and administrative board, and to some extent an additional staff of instructors, although not a distinct Faculty. Dr. Horace David Arnold has been appointed Dean; and the School opened its courses in October, 1912, with a very promising registration.

Hospitals.

Reference has been made on a preceding page and in former reports to the closer relations between the Medical School and the different hospitals. The central factor in the movement is the alliance with the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, situated opposite the main entrance to the School. The buildings are nearly completed, and will be ready for the first patients in a few weeks. In accordance with the arrangement for a joint selection of the staff of the Hospital and instructors in the School. Dr. Christian, our Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine, is the Physician-in-Chief of the Hospital, and Dr. Harvey Cushing, formerly of Johns Hopkins University, is Surgeon-in-Chief and has taken his chair as Moseley Professor of Surgery at the School. The other members of the staff have been selected by mutual understanding.

Notable also in the history of the School have been the opening of the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital for Cancer in close co-operation with the School, and the calling for the first time of a non-resident to a chair in the School and a leading position on the staff of the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. David Linn Edsall, formerly of the University of Pennsylvania and later of Washington University at St. Louis, was appointed chief of one of the two continuous medical services at the Hospital and Jackson Professor of Clinical Medicine in the School. The only other appointment to a full professorship has been the promotion of George Gray Scars to Clinical Professor of Medicine.

Medical School Discoveries.

The year has been remarkable for a series of contributions to medical science made at the School. During the summer and autumn of 1912 Dr. Folin published his discoveries in metabolism, which made a profound impression, and his analysis of the blood in cases of rheumatism and gout; Dr. Mallory, his discovery of the germ of whooping cough; while Dr. Rosenau, with the co-operation of Dr. Richardson of the State Board of Health and Professor Wheeler of the Bussey Institution, ascertained that infantile paralysis was transmitted through a species of stable fly (Stomoxys calcitrans). Enlarging the bounds of knowledge is a function of a university no less essential than imparting it; and in one field are the two more closely connected today than in medicine. Three such discoveries in the course of a single year are, therefore, a deep source of gratification.

Exchange Professorships.

During the year we have been fortunate in our exchange professors, both in those we have received and those we have sent forth. From France came Dr. Charles Dichl, Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Paris; from Germany Dr. Willy Kuekenthal, Professor of Zoology and Director of the Zoological Institute at the University of Breslau. To Berlin we sent Professor Theobald Smith of the Medical School, and to Paris Professor William Morris Davis of the Geological Department. The alliance whereby we are to send annually a member of our staff to lecture for a month at each of four Western colleges, Knox, Beloit, Grinnell, and Colorado, was inaugurated during the second half of the year by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart. Instructors were sent to Harvard by two only of these colleges. They were Walter Houghton Freeman, Instructor in Greek at Grinnell, who acted as Assistant in Greek here; and Elijah Clarence Hill, Head Professor of Romance Languages and Literature of Colorado, who gave an independent course in Spanish-American poetry.

Widener Memorial Library.

The University as a whole rejoices in the munificent offer of a new library building by Mrs. George D. Widener. Gore Hall has long been lamentably insufficient to contain the books on its catalogue. Many thousands of them, in yearly increasing numbers, have been stored in the basements of other buildings, while Gore Hall itself has been far too crowded for a proper use even of the volumes on its shelves. Among the precious lives lost on the "Titanic" was that of Harry Elkins Widener of the class of 1907, a rare collector of rare books. His collection, comprising many editions of great value and interest, he left to his mother, with a request to give it to Harvard when there was a building suitable for the purpose. But Gore Hall was not fireproof, and Mrs. Widener, in view of the conditions, generously determined to build a complete university library on the general interior plan worked out by our committee of architects a year ago, with additional rooms for her son's books in a part of the open court in the centre of the building. These rooms and the volumes they contain are to be under the charge of a special librarian selected by Mrs. Widener, who gives also a fund of $150,000 to care for, and at her discretion to enlarge, the collection. The other parts of the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library will form the four sides of a quadrangle, whereof the northern side, with the main entrance, will cover very nearly the site of the present Gore Hall, and the south front will be about one hundred feet from Massachusetts avenue. The building will contain one large and several smaller reading rooms on the North, and rooms for seminars on the upper floor; while the greater part of the eastern, western and southern sections will be occupied by the stack, in which, however, there will be provided working rooms for professors and a large number of tables separated by glass screens for other readers. Such an arrangement is designed to make the stack as convenient of access as possible to the scholars who use it, so that they may work with all their tools at hand.

Housing our books where they would be safe and could be used during the construction of the new building was no easy problem. It has been solved partly by turning Upper and Lower Massachusetts into reading-rooms; partly by the hospitality of Andover Theological Seminary, which has kindly allowed us to use any vacant space on its shelves; partly by sending appropriate books to various departmental libraries; but chiefly by transferring the students' dining-tables from Randall Hall to Foxcroft, and building temporary stacks for four hundred thousand volumes in the Hall, one of the few fireproof buildings we possess. Although the transfer of the books was made in term-time, it was carried out by Professor Coolidge, the Director of the Library, with such skill that there has been almost no interruption in their use.

Coolidge Memorial Laboratory.

Another important gift of a building has been that of a chemical laboratory by the Hon. T. Jefferson Coolidge in memory of his son, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, Jr., of the class of 1884. This building will be nearly of the same size as the Wolcott Gibbs Laboratory, and will be used for quantitative analysis. It faces Divinity avenue, and will form part of the proposed, and sorely needed, group of chemical laboratories between that avenue and Oxford street. Work upon it had been carried on as rapidly as possible, with the result that by the end of the year 1912 the outer walls were built and the timbers of the root were laid, ensuring its readiness for use before the opening of the next college year.

Other Gifts.

Of the other gifts received the largest have been: that of Mrs. Sage for the Freshman Dormitory; $100,000 from the class of 1887 on its twenty-fifth anniversary; $125,000 from Mr. Edmund Cogswell Converse to found a professorship of Banking in the School of Business Administration; $100,000 from Mrs. Collis P. Huntington for the construction of the Cancer Hospital; $74,285.71 from the estate of Mrs. William O. Moseley for travelling fellowships in the Medical School; $50,000 from the estate of Miss Harrlet E. Goodnow to keep poor students in Harvard College; $50,000 from Mr. George R. Agassiz for the use of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. These and many other benefactions are described more fully in the report of the Treasurer.

Pressing Needs of University.

Recipients of such generosity seem churlish in asking for more, but our needs are ever outrunning out resources, and one of the objects of the annual report is to point them out. There is still a deficit in the University, College and Library account, although for the year 1911-12 it was reduced to $14,750.40. Until it disappears we cannot expect an expansion of those departments that are undermanned, and still less any increase in salaries. That the incomes of professors are inadequate in view of the grade of talent required is generally admitted, and the constant rise in prices has been reducing their purchasing power year by year. One of the most pressing needs is more laboratories for instruction and research in Chemistry, perhaps the most promsing field for scientific investigation and one in which our equipment is still singularly insufficient. Another is an endowment for the Dental School, the imperative need of which was urged in the last report with a reference to the great services rendered to the public by the operating rooms and the sacrifices of the clinical instructors. Still another is the endowment of professorships in the School of Business Administration. One such, in Banking, has been founded as already stated by the generosity of Mr. Converse, but three more are required, and efforts are being made to raise the funds by subscriptions. Every professional school has meant the substitution of thorough instruction in the principles of an art for the slower and less comprehensive process of learning them by apprenticeship; and this School is based on a belief that the principles governing business organization and methods, which have been wrought out in practice by the labor of a generation of expert administrators, can be taught in a way to save the time of the student and make him more efficient. No new professional school, moreover, demonstrates its full value swiftly, and we need not be surprised that most of the students in our School still think a single year of its training sufficient. That the School, however, has already won recognition of its usefulness is proved by the rapid increase in the number of men entering it. During the first few years the progress was naturally slow, but the period of experiment appears to have passed; for the number of first-year students taking full work rose in the autumn of 1912 to 71 as against 45 the year before, and these 71 were graduates of 35 different colleges in all parts of the country.

Friends of the University are trying to raise money for a building for the Department of Music. The sum required to erect the building has been generously offered on condition that $50,000 is subscribed for its maintenance, and this is nearly accomplished. An effort is also being made to enlarge the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in accordance, with the original plan, and the subscriptions for this purpose are well under way. The collections of American ethnology are large and constantly growing, too large already for the building new standing. When the addition is built the University Museum designed by Mr. Agassiz will be complete.

University Press.

The University now possesses several special funds for the publication of books or periodicals on various subjects. These funds in the aggregate are considerably, but there is a growing conviction that a great institution of learning cannot attain its full usefulness without a university press which can publish the writings of its scholars. To that object the special funds now in hand would contribute greatly. Yet it is not enough that certain subjects are provided for. Nor do these funds enable the University to do its own printing. It would be an advantage, and in the long run as economy, if we could collect fonts of type in different languages which a commercial printer can ill afford to buy for the text or notes to an occasional book which may come into his hands. Many of the books issued by a university press would more than pay for themselves. Almost all of them would pay a part of their cost, but some works of great scholarly value yield little and can be published in no other way. If selected by a judicious committee, the publications of such a press would contribute much to the credit of the University, and, what is more important, would stimulate productive scholarship which still lags behind in America. Neither the initial cost of such a press nor the expense of maintenance is very large, but an endowment is absolutely essential if it is to be established. A committee has been appointed to consider the subject and ascertain whether the funds can be procured.

Forms of Useful Gifts.

One word about the form of gifts that will ensure the greatest usefulness. Sometimes benefactors encumber their funds with provisions too inelastic in their application. The object may well be made precise, so that the intent shall be strictly observed; but the best means of attaining that object may vary in the course of time. Permanent funds endure into an indefinite future, and it is not wise to try to be wiser than all posterity. The details of application for the object named may often be left to the sagacity of those who will come hereafter.

In a brief annual report it is impossible even to touch upon all the manifold activities of the University. It is better to confine one's remarks to the matters of most common interest, without intending to imply that other things are of less importance. Nothing has, therefore, been said here of many of our great departments, such as the Observatory, the Arboretum, the Bussey Institution, the Museums, and the laboratories. For these and for more detailed information about the different Faculties and Schools, the Overseers and friends of the University are respectfully referred to the reports of the Deans and Directors which are submitted and printed herewith.