The embryo lawyer, the physician, the clergyman, have throughout a college course been pursuing parallel courses of training; it has given them little that they can make of immediate use in the office or the study, but it has laid the foundation for that special research necessary in every profession. The professional school builds on the training of the college, and it not only gives the information necessary in a professional career, but it opens the door to the vast field of investigation which it is one of the aims of every professional man to explore. Thus the housekeeper, forgetting her Latin, Greek, and mathematics, her French, German, and history, her biology, astronomy and economics, retains as the most valuable heritage of her education a training in habits of accuracy, observation, good judgment, and self-control that enables her to be the master of any unexpected situation that may arise. From the beginning of school life until the close of the college course the conditions surrounding the young man and the young woman are similar. Each has the benefit of all the information and the general educational training the college can give. To each alike the three great professions of law, medicine, and theology open their doors and invite special study and investigation. But if the young woman, turning her back on these attractive fields of work, desires to study the household in a similar professional way, she finds it a _terra incognita_. She realizes that absolutely nothing has been done in any educational institution toward investigating its past history, its present conditions, or its future needs. It is said in another field that every lawyer owes a debt of gratitude to his profession which can be paid only by some personal contribution to the sum of knowledge in his profession. One of his aims, therefore, as is that of every professional man, is to leave the world richer in his own field through the investigation of its unexplored parts. Thus law, medicine, and theology grow by virtue of the accumulated wisdom of those engaged in their pursuit. But the housekeeper finds that housekeeping as a profession has made no advances. It has not grown through the accumulated wisdom of past generations as have the so-called learned professions. Whatever advances it has made have come from impetus given it by other occupations through their own progress. Housekeeping affairs have been passive recipients of general progress, not active participants in it. If, then, domestic science is to be made a subject of serious study and is to be accorded a permanent place in the school curriculum, if the household is to profit by the educational progress of the day, it can only be after the university has taken the initiative and has made all matters pertaining to the house and home a subject of scientific research. THE RELATION OF COLLEGE WOMEN TO DOMESTIC SCIENCE