QUACK--DETECTION A

Much fun has been poked at the courses in winehusbandry and the like that are offered in the University of Illinois; and efforts of this same institution to purge the curriculum of everything that is of no practical value have been the objects of a storm of adverse criticism. In the meantime, the Harvard student has smiled in a most superior fashion and congratulated himself and his friends upon the absence of any similar foolishness within his own academic domain. Harvard, of course, is free from such nonsense and the proponents of it.

His superiority bump, like Mr. Taft's political one, becomes somewhat of a cavity, however, when he is informed of a very practical proposal that comes from his immediate vicinity. Dr. A. A. Roback of the University's faculty has voiced the opinion that colleges should have courses of instruction that especially prepare students for the quacks they will meet when they graduate, thus rudely upsetting the Harvard man's preconceptions concerning the advantages that his education was going to give him. He had always supposed that the enlightenment of which he was the recipient while in college would furnish him the power to discriminate between the true and the false, the good and the had. Little did he dream that he needed a special course on the detection of quackery, including, perhaps, a study of all the Cagliostros and Coues in history and even a little practical experimentation on the streets of Cambridge.