like coins, casts, and models, if the active use of such aids is to be secured. Acquaintance with a considerable number of colleges and universities, large and small, in this country fails to disclose any appreciable number in which the material equipment of the historical department has passed much beyond the stage of crude beginnings. With exceptions so few as almost to be counted on the fingers, the most generous provision, always excepting the general library of the institution, goes no further than the use, prevailingly in conjunction with other unrelated departments, of one or more lecture-rooms; a “seminary room,” furnished with a table and some chairs, and housing such odds and ends of books as the industry of the instructors or the intermittent generosity of friends has got together, reënforced by loans from the main library; and possibly an office frequently shared by all the members of the department, where students may come for consultation. If, as seems rarely to be the case, the department has any adequate supply of maps, they have often to be kept in some out-of-the-way place, and carried about from room to room as needed; and almost never are there tables and instruments for the drawing of maps and charts. Meagre as is such equipment, some of our leading institutions do not have even this. If it be true, as it seems to be, that student interest, particularly among men, in literature, history, and philosophy, has declined markedly in recent years, may not something of the cause be found, not in the inherently greater attractiveness of mixing chemicals or dissecting cats and birds, but in the utter poverty and bareness of the quarters in which students of the humanities are commonly asked to do their work? If professors of history have fallen too much into the habit of lecturing, instead of teaching, may it not be due in part to the failure of the university to give even the ablest of them facilities for doing anything else?