It would seem to be a truism that the facilities which are to be regarded as indispensable to the proper study of a subject, and which ought, therefore, to be provided as a matter of course, should, like the methods of teaching, be determined by the nature of the subject, or, in other words, by the kind of material with which it has to deal; but the disparity in the equipment of the various departments of study and research commonly to be observed in even the best and richest American colleges and universities seems to indicate that, so far at least as the so-called “humanities” are concerned, little provision of appliances, save modest shelter from the weather and seats enough for the class, is generally thought absolutely necessary. No one who knows at close range the “plant” of a typical American university will be at a loss for striking and even painful illustrations of the unequal distribution of material equipment. Broadly speaking, the departments of physical and natural science and engineering do not seriously lack the primary facilities which the nature of their work demands. Upon these departments, in the last twenty years, the wealth of the State and of individuals has been poured out like water, while more than one institution, spurred by a demand for “practicality” and “efficiency,” has gone to the length of drawing upon its capital to supply what was wanting. Our institutions of learning abound in well-contrived laboratory buildings for physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering, containing not only lecture rooms for the various instructors and laboratories for students elementary and advanced, but also private laboratories and offices for the professors, exhibition and photographic rooms, libraries, lockers, and other special apartments. The rooms themselves are commonly well supplied with apparatus and material, distributed and apportioned according to the number of students and investigators, and increased by regular appropriation, and as a matter of course, as the number of users grows. There is usually a special janitor or caretaker for the building, and often one or more skilled persons regularly employed in making or repairing apparatus, preparing or caring for specimens or stock, and the like. It has long been a matter of common observation that the cost of maintaining the scientific departments of a university, or even of a small college, is out of all proportion to the cost of the other departments of instruction, that it is met by governing boards with comparative readiness, and that it is often afforded, it must bluntly be said, at the cost of deplorable and systematic niggardliness in other directions. Other things being equal, no scientist to-day would consider for a moment a call to an institution which could not afford him all of these things, nor would the scientific world reckon the instruction of an institution not so equipped as worth while.