Experience has convinced the instructors that any course, particularly an introductory one, which deals in specious generalizations and vague trends of development to the exclusion of a thorough drill in concrete facts will, of necessity, be a failure; and so the methods of instruction are designed, first of all, to secure an accurate knowledge of events,--to make the student master the fundamental data upon which any real comprehension of a great movement as a whole must be based. Of course, this is equivalent to saying that we do not consider the lecture method adapted to the immaturity of first year students,--even the mixture of lecture and quiz recitations seems to offer too many temptations to irregularity and slovenliness. Consequently, each of our three exercises per week is devoted to a thorough test of the student’s industry by oral questioning and, at frequent intervals, by short written papers. The fact that the class is divided into small divisions, averaging only twenty men in each, makes the desired end comparatively easy of attainment. In the matter of text-books, three or four are used, chosen for their supplementary excellencies, and with the additional object in view of developing in the student an elementary power of comparison and synthesis,--an ability to select facts from different sources and mould them into some sort of orderly cohesion for presentation in the recitation. The proof that he has done this is sought, not only in the recitation, but by inspection of his note-book, in which he is required to keep a condensed but carefully arranged digest of the facts gleaned from the various books. As regards original sources, an experience lasting for a period of six years has forced upon the unwilling minds of the instructors the conviction that contemporary material, as a part of the required reading, cannot be used to advantage in a general course, so broad in scope as the one we are considering. The experiment was a thorough one and long continued,--in fact, the feeling that we _ought_ to find a profitable method of using sources lingered long after the proof had been forced upon us that we could not, and it has produced no change in the general opinion that such work is of the utmost value where time is available to pursue it properly. But in this particular instance, that was precisely what we could not do, at least not without entirely changing the character of the course and modifying its relation to the rest of the curriculum. Source collections are therefore no longer among the required text-books, but are relegated to the domain of collateral reading.