university in its teaching functions results from a precisely similar cause. In the case of the college, one or two details have lately been the occasion of criticism. In the educational as in the social and administrative functions, the machinery is apparently overgrown. Until well into the nineteenth century, the body of instruction offered was much the same as in the English colleges of the seventeenth century, or in the pass schools of to-day,--a modified version of the mediæval trivium and quadrivium. When a new world of intellectual life was opened, most academic leaders regarded it with abhorrence. The old studies were the only studies to develop the manners and the mind; the new studies were barbarous, and dwarfed the understanding. All learning had been contained in a pint-pot, and must continue to be so. If the old curriculum had prevailed, the old system might have continued to serve, in spite of the enormous increase of students; but it did not. Discussions of the educational value of the new learning are still allowed to consume paper and ink; but the cause of the old pint-pot was lost decades ago. All branches are taught, and are open to all students. The live question to-day both in England and America is not whether we shall recognize the new subjects, but how and in what proportion we shall teach them. In England, where the colleges and the university are separate, the teaching and the examining are separate. The student prepares in college for an examination by the university. It is as a result of this that the subjects of instruction have been divided and organized into honor schools; and here again the division and organization have resulted in sounder and more efficient functioning. In America, such a division has never been made: the teaching and the degree-granting offices have remained identical. The professor in each "course" is also the examiner, and the freedom of choice of necessity goes not by groups of related studies but by small disconnected courses. As the field of recognized knowledge developed, new courses were added, and the student was granted a greater range of choice. Whereas of old all the instruction of the college might and had to be taken in four years, the modern courses could scarcely be exhausted in a full century. This American system, earliest advocated at Harvard, is called the elective system, and has made its way, in a more or less developed form, into all American universities worthy of the name. Its primary work was that of the Oxford honor schools--the shattering of the old pint-pot. It has done this work; but it is now in train to become no less a superstition than the older system, and is thus no less a menace to the cause of education.