I incline to think, too, that a regulation forbidding elementary courses in the later years would render our education more coherent. In this matter elective colleges have an opportunity which prescribed ones miss. In order to be fair to all the sciences, college faculties are obliged to scatter fragments of them throughout the length and breadth of prescribed curricula. Twenty-five years ago every Harvard man waited till his senior year before beginning philosophy, acoustics, history, and political economy. To-day the fourteen other New England colleges, most of whom, like the Harvard of twenty-five years ago, offer a certain number of elective studies, still show senior years largely occupied with elementary studies. Five forbid philosophy before the senior year; eight, political economy; two, history; six, geology. Out of the seven colleges which offer some one of the eastern languages, all except Harvard oblige the alphabet to be learned in the senior year. Of the six which offer Italian or Spanish, Harvard alone permits a beginning to be made before the junior year, while two take up these languages for the first time in the senior year. In three New England colleges German cannot be begun till the junior year. In a majority, a physical subject is begun in the junior and another in the senior year. At Yale nobody but a senior can study chemistry. Such postponement, and by consequence such fragmentary work, may be necessary where early college years are crowded with prescribed studies. But an elective system can employ its later years to better advantage. It can bring to a mature understanding the interests which freshmen and sophomores have already acquired. Elementary studies are not maturing studies; they do not make the fibre of a student firm. To studies of a solidifying sort the last years should be devoted. I should like to forbid seniors to take any elementary study whatever, and to forbid juniors all except philosophy, political economy, history, fine arts, Sanskrit, Hebrew, and law. Under such a rule we should graduate more men who would be first rate at something; and a man who is first rate at something is generally pretty good at anything.