above mentioned geologic folios are sold for 25 cents each. Application for any and all publications should be made to the Director, U. S. Geological Survey, Washington, D. C. A NOTE in the British Medical Journal states that the opening up of Central and Eastern Africa has revealed the fact that instead of zebras being nearly extinct, these animals exist in large numbers on the banks of the Tama River and in the province of Ukamba. Unlike horses and cattle, they are proof against horse sickness and the fatal tsetse fly. At the present time, for land transport in war, mules are almost universally employed, and they are used for the carriage of mountain batteries. Professor Cossar Ewart has at Penycuik since 1895 been endeavoring by zebra-horse hybrids to evolve' an animal that shall be superior to the mule for the purposes for which that animal is usually employed. There are three kinds or types of zebras-namely, Grevy's zebra of Shoa and Somaliland, the mountain zebra (equus zebra), once common in South Africa, and known as the common zebra, and the widelydistributed Burchell group of zebras. The zebra-horse hybrids were obtained by crossing mares of various sizes with a zebra stallion, a Burchell's zebra; and the new animals get the name of 'zebrules.' They seem excellently adapted by their build and general make, as well as by the hardness of hoof, for transport purposes and artillery batteries. The zebra striping is often distinct, though in color they more generally resemble their dam. They stand fourteen hands high, with a girth measurement of sixty-three inches. Their temper seems to be better than that of the ordinary mule, and they are exceedingly active, alert and intelligent. The Indian government is giving them a trial in Quetta for mountain battery work, and they are being put, also, to a practical test in Germany.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL NEWS.

THE Royal Geographical Society has appropriated £200 a year for five years, and the general board of studies of Cambridge University the same sum for a School of Geography at the university.

PROFESSOR W. N. FERRIN has been elected president of the Pacific University at Forest Grove, Oregon.

DR. ALLEN J. SMITH, present professor of pathology in the University of Texas, has been elected professor of pathology at the University of Pennsylvania, in succession to Dr. Simon Flexner, director of the Rockefeller Institute, New York.

MR. EDGAR JAMES SWIFT, A.B. (Amherst, 1886), who has held a fellowship at Clark University for the past two years and has just taken an examination for the doctor's degree there, has been appointed professor of psychology and pedagogy in the Washington University at St. Louis.

MR. M. E. STICKNEY, of Harvard University, has been appointed instructor in botany in Denison University to succeed Mr. W. W. Stockberger, resigned.

THE following appointments have been made at McGill University: Dr. J. G. McCarthy, to be assistant professor of anatomy; Dr. J. T. Halsey, to be assistant professor of pharmacology and therapeutics; Dr. R. A. Kerry, to be lecturer in pharmacology and therapeutics; Dr. S. Ridley Mackenzie, to be lecturer in clinical surgery; Dr. John McCrae, to be lecturer in pathology; Dr. D. A. Shirres, to be lecturer in neuro-pathology; Dr. D. D. McTaggart, to be lecturer in medico-legal pathology.

AT University College, London, Dr. Page May has been appointed lecturer on the physiology of the nervous system, and Mr. J. H. Parsons, lecturer on physiological optics. A CHAIR of agricultural botany has been established at Rennes, with M. Danniel as professor.

DR. EMIL KRAEPELIN, professor of psychiatry at Heidelberg, has been called to Munich. DR. W. LOSSEN, professor of chemistry at Königsberg, has retired.

DR. CARL HUGO HUPPERT, professor of medical chemistry at the German University of Prague, will retire at the end of the present semester.

more than any other animal, is social and gregarious, and the evolution of laws for the best interests of the race is as certain as the evolution of the organic world.

The concentration of forces in the industrial world, by whatsoever name we call them, is an expression of a definite social law. Many of my hearers will remember . when every village had its own shoemaker, its butcher and baker and candlestick maker, all laboriously and with wasted energy doing those things which are now being done by scores of producers. The trusts or combinations may and will do things cheaper and better, because they concentrate in labor and material and time, all of which are possible because of increased specialization.

But it is a grave problem to all of us how far such specialization and concentration shall be permitted to go, that they may not outrun control, that they may not result in the subjugation of the weaker and their undue dependency upon the greed of

the leaders of the industrial forces. When wealth and power have become perpetual, and poverty insurmountable, then would trusts and monopolies be intolerable and dissolution imminent.

Of such results, however, there is less probability than ever before in the world's history. The fountain of civilization is constantly bubbling up afresh to replace that which is foul and effete. Never before has there been less danger of stratification in our social organism. In the past history of life upon our earth it has been a law that the highest organisms of one epoch have developed, not from the dominant organisms of a preceding epoch, but from the middle classes, if I may apply such a term to them. From the farm and the work shop will come the leaders of the next generation, even as those of the present generation are, for the most part, of similar origin.

With every succeeding generation of men, as of other animals, the summit of evolution is gradually becoming higher. The way toward success is longer, but our strides are greater. Specialization is an inviolable law of nature, to which man is no exception, physically or psychically. How shall we recognize this in education? How shall we determine that which is real and avoid that which is unreal?

It must be apparent to all that our modern industrial activities are having a profound influence upon our systems of education. Or is it largely because of our improved methods in education that America is attaining its great commercial importance at the present time? A new generation has grown up since technical schools of agriculture have been established throughout our land, and technical and professional schools of all kinds have improved in a most extraordinary way during the past twenty years. The engineer is no longer a country surveyor; the physician is no longer one who turns from the plow or anvil to pills and powders with a few months' interim of perfunctory lectures; the lawyer is no longer graduated from the village law office. President Draper has recently deplored the passing of the family doctor and the coming in his stead of the specialist. He regrets that the man, the counselor and friend is merging into the cold, unsympathetic scientist. tist. But who is there of us, when danger is imminent, that would not rather choose that same unsympathetic scientist, skilled and skilful in all that goes toward success? Who would choose the village-educated lawyer to fight a powerful trust? Special knowledge and special skill the world must have and the world will have wherever possible, and special skill is possible for every one, even though it be in nothing more than the sharpening of a jack-knife. Is there any one who doubts this? Is there

any one who prefers inferiority in a multitude of things rather than eminence in a few things or in one thing? It is not, then, a question of the desirability of special skill, but rather of how that special skill may be best attained.

I have no patience with those who think, because a student prefers to spend months or years of study in the bacteriological laboratory when he might have been devoting his attention to Greek mythology, that he is actuated by a commercial spirit, that, because he is doing something well which he will afterwards find useful, he is mercenary. Thirty years ago, however, the average college professor would have been shocked by the bare suggestion that his pupils desired to make any practical use of the knowledge he imparted, or that the single inelastic college course of those days was not the best preparation for any vocation in life.

There is still a prevalent belief, even though much modified from that of former days, that the general training of the intellectual powers should continue through at least three, if not four, years of college life -that specialization should not begin early, if one wishes to accomplish the most in life. That late specialization is not the best in all professions the world has long conceded. What eminent musician has there been who did not begin his musical training while yet a child? What great artist has there been who first decided upon his life's work after graduation from a college course? How many novelists of wide reputation are there who have been college graduates even? How few, indeed, are the great leaders in commerce, science or the arts who did not begin their distinctive pursuits early in life. Ask an Agassiz, a Darwin or a Huxley, or any one of our able naturalists, when he first began the study of nature, and he will reply that he was always a naturalist. Is it probable

that such men would have been greater men had they devoted four years of their life to the humanities alone? Is the great musician less successful because his training may have been at the expense of Greek, mathematics or chemistry? It is true, indeed, that such men are often one-sided, cranky, as the world calls them, and that undue specialization has robbed them of much of the sweeter part of life, has put them out of joint with the world, has often left them, as Agassiz has said, with no time to make money, but I believe that it is better to have cranky specialists than not to have them at all. Away with the idea that such men are always born great; if early specialization is good for men with great powers, it is better for those with small powers. Precocity may be a sign of greatness, but I believe more often greatness is the result of precocity, the result of early concentration before the plasticity of youth is irrevocably gone. We cheerfully admit that the violinist must begin his special training while yet his muscles are plastic. Is the mind less plastic than the muscles, and is there not as great need that it should be molded early? You can not teach old dogs new tricks, nor is it often possible to teach a man new tricks after he has become matured.

Very recently a Chicago author has published a book in which he endeavors to prove, from the testimony of many prominent men of business, that a general college course is detrimental to success in a business career, and it is well known that such successful men as is Carnegie have given assent to such views. Like all such generalizations there may be both truth and falsity in this one. For many men, and by no means the poorer men, I firmly believe that a general college course is detrimental as preparation for a business career, while to all a special education and a fixed motive in their education are of

benefit. We clearly recognize to-day that the object of higher education is less the acquisition of knowledge than the acquisition of power to use knowledge, and any education which neglects those powers most necessary in a given vocation is sure to be of harm, either negatively or positively.

As a rule, I believe that the college education materially helps towards the largest success in life only when that education is to a greater or less degree a special education. Some will benefit by a wide cultural training, others will not. A broad man may benefit by a broad training; the narrow man must be content with a narrower preparation to fit him for a narrower path in life. A four years' course in Greek or paleontology will not enable the apprentice to wipe a joint nearly as well as would a four weeks' laboratory course under a master plumber. But a too broad training is, I believe, better than a too narrow one. One so trained is more apt to make a better citizen though he makes fewer dollars. A more rational system, and one towards which the educational world seems rapidly tending, is to neglect neither the general nor the special. The one fundamental principle in the teaching of science at the present day is the laboratory, the cultivation of skill in doing things rather than in knowing about things. In all the technical professions this is assumed, even though it may be carried to an undue extent. At least we are all agreed that the one chief object of education is to make the student think, and then do. How much does the general college education do this for many pursuits in life?

Professor Thorndike, in a recent number of the Century Magazine, has given an interesting analysis of the careers of the Phi Beta Kappa scholars during the past sixty years. He has shown that during these years the proportion of those who have followed the so-called learned profes

sions of law, the ministry, medicine and teaching has remained nearly uniform at about sixty-five per cent., but that in some of these vocations the proportions have increased at the expense of those in others. The percentage of those scholars following the legal profession has advanced materially, while there has been a marked falling off in the proportion of those who have become clergymen. In the percentage of teachers there has been a striking increase, while that of physicians has increased from five to about seven per cent. Membership in this society in the past has been conferred upon those students who have attained a high stand in the so-called cultural studies especially, professional students being excluded even yet. What is more reasonable to suppose than that such students would of choice seek those pursuits for which their training has more especially fitted them, and in which they have attained scholarly success? The decrease in the number of those seeking the ministerial calling has been dependent upon entirely different causes, though I will venture to say that the percentage of Phi Beta scholars following this profession. is larger than among other graduates with similar training. While there are so many more such scholars among our teachers than formerly in the profession of medicone, I doubt not there are proportionally fewer than there were fifty years ago. The increase of but two or three per cent. for this profession is very suggestive, and even this increase is more apparent than real. In recent years the requirements for the Bachelor of Arts degree have everywhere been much liberalized, and the Phi Beta Kappa scholar is apt to be far more varied in his training than he was formerly. In other words Mahomet has not gone far toward the mountains, but the mountains are coming to Mahomet. Professor Thorndike deplores this lack of high