Perhaps the most difficult question which now confronts the college teacher of history is the work of the first year of the college course. The problem is comparatively new, and becomes each year more serious. Twenty-five or thirty years ago the small amount of history taught in American colleges came in the junior or senior year, and was not organized into any regular curriculum. With the recent development of historical courses, however, the teaching of history has worked down into the sophomore and often into the freshman year, so that the teacher of the first course in history is not only charged with introducing students to college work in history, but must also take his share of the task of introducing them to college work in general. At the same time the enlargement of the curriculum and the improvement of instruction in history in many of our secondary schools result in sending to the colleges a body of students who have already some familiarity with history and cannot be treated in the same way as the great mass of freshmen. Moreover, the first college course in history in all our larger institutions attracts a considerable number of students, in some cases as many as four hundred, so that the management of a large class adds another element to the problem; and matters are further complicated by the fact that while some of these will continue their historical studies in later years, others must get from this course all the historical training which they will receive in college. I take it that no one pretends to have found the solution of these difficulties, and that what is at present likely to prove helpful is not dogmatic discussion so much as a comparison of the experience of different institutions.