LATEST LEFT

The tutorial system, spreading in ever-widening circles of inclusion, takes in today the last but one, of the sciences taught in Harvard College. If the force of conversions to the tutorial system may be said to be cumulative, this event yields place to two others; some ten years ago when the Department of History, Government and Economics presented the system to Harvard College, and that indefinite but somehow expectable day when the tutorial system and Harvard College may be linked without qualification or exception.

The advent of this latter day rests largely upon the success of the tutorial system in the scientific departments which have already adopted it. But the Chemistry Department, which must be giving the system serious thought, since it is the only science still astray for the fold, may not wait for instantaneous success elsewhere to make its own decision. The change of the Biology Department went into effect only this fall, yet the Department of Geology announced its change to the tutorial system on March 22, when conclusive data on the result in biology of the experiment could scarcely have been available.

If the Department of Chemistry contemplates making the change, there will be available data that would seem to bear somewhat directly on the decision. Two years ago the Department of Bio-Chemical Sciences was created, with the object of removing evils then present in the system of pre-medical education. Although the achievements toward which the two systems point are essentially different, there is a similarity between the field that is not wholly superficial. The kinship between Physics and Chemistry is likewise great enough so that the influence of the sister science will probably be thrown into the scales. Dangerous in the extreme would be any application of the principle of unity as an educational rule of thumb; nevertheless the acceptance of the tutorial system by one of the two sciences that had been unincluded within it makes the hot light of attention focus the more directly on the lone remaining field of concentration.