A degree implies a dissertation, or, as it is more commonly and less correctly termed, a thesis. I need not here express any opinion as to the merits or defects of these documents as a class. What I wish to speak of is their value to university and college libraries, and the difficulty of discovering what dissertations are produced annually, and, for reference libraries, of procuring them when discovered. I presume the librarian who knows the specialist's insatiate greed for dissertations, _programmen_, and small pamphlets generally will need no words of mine to bring home to him the need of procuring as many of these documents as he can. Whatever we may say in derogation of doctors' dissertations--and they have their faults--they at least represent long-continued and careful investigation under supposedly competent direction, and the specialist must have them. It is a comparatively easy task to get him German and other foreign dissertations. The new ones are listed annually and the old ones load the shelves of the second-hand stores of Europe. But to find what is being produced here in this country is by no means a simple undertaking. And it behooves us, unless we tacitly admit that our American dissertations are not worth having, to take some steps toward bettering the present situation. In order to ascertain the exact condition of things I have selected fifteen representative institutions which confer the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and have studied their requirements and conducted some correspondence with their librarians. These institutions have been selected purely as representing various geographical and educational conditions, and omissions from the list are not to be taken _in malam partem_. They are: (1) Brown, (2) Bryn Mawr, (3) California, (4) Chicago, (5) Columbia, (6) Cornell, (7) Harvard, (8) Johns Hopkins, (9) Michigan, (10) Nebraska, (11) Pennsylvania, (12) Princeton, (13) Stanford, (14) Wisconsin, and (15) Yale. The majority of these universities require that before the degree is conferred the thesis shall be printed and a fixed number of copies, ranging from 50 to 250, shall be deposited with some officer of the university or in the library. The statistics are as follows: California requires 150 copies. Chicago requires 100 copies. "Accepted theses become the property of the university." Columbia requires 150 copies. Cornell requires 50 copies. Michigan requires 150 copies. Nebraska requires 150 copies. Pennsylvania requires 250 copies. Stanford requires 100 copies. Wisconsin requires 100 copies. Two institutions, Bryn Mawr and Princeton, require the printing of the thesis, but make no requirement, so far as can be ascertained from the catalogs, that there shall be any deposit of copies. Johns Hopkins and Pennsylvania allow the thesis to be either written or printed; if printed, Johns Hopkins requires the deposit of 150 copies, Pennsylvania of 250, except under certain conditions which will appear later.