a recent German publication--we are forced to exclaim, "What are our colleges about? Are they incompetent, or asleep?" Neither one nor the other. Most of our professors do the best they can. But they are fettered by routine: they are not stimulated and sustained by the consciousness that their private studies may be made directly available in the classroom. They lead two lives, as it were--one as professor, the other as thinker and reader--and there is not the proper action and reaction between the two. The remedy is as easy to propose as it would be difficult to apply. We have only to convert our colleges into universities, our college instructors into professors after the German model. Let us relegate all teaching, so called, to the schools, and let us give our professors permission to expand into veritable scholars discoursing to young men of kindred spirit. Any one can see at a glance that from the wish to the accomplishment is a long way. Upon some of us the consciousness is beginning to dawn that perhaps we have not even taken the first decisive step. The best that can be said of our colleges is that they are in a state of transition. We have increased the number of studies, as well as the number of colleges; we have established schools of law and schools of science, sometimes independent of, sometimes co-ordinate with or subordinate to, the college. We have also established post-graduate courses, in the hope of inducing our young men to complete their studies at home. Yet every year we see a larger number going abroad. In those days of golden memory, both for Germany and for America, when Longfellow was gliding down the Rhine with Freiligrath, and Bancroft and Bismarck were comrades at Göttingen, an American in Germany was something of a rarity. In most instances he was a man of wealth and high social standing, who looked upon his semester or two as a romantic episode. But now every outward-bound steamer carries with it one or more who, emerging from obscurity and poverty, have saved up a few hundred dollars and are bent upon plain, hard, practical business. "We go," they can be imagined as saying, "because we can get in Germany what we cannot get at home. Your schools of science and your post-graduate courses may be well enough in their way, but they do not give us what we are after, and we cannot afford to wait until they may be able to give it. Some of the professors are first-rate men--perhaps just as good as any we may meet in Germany--but what does their learning, their science, avail us, so long as they are obliged to withhold from us the best that they know? They trained themselves in Germany, and if we are ever to rival them we must do the same."