linguist. It does not follow that he will say that these two ought not both to be exercised in both kinds of study. During the formative process uncongenial studies no doubt have their uses. But there comes a time when the formative process practically ceases, and then the kind of mental exercise which is educationally profitable will be found in the study of subjects that are congenial.

Development of Elective Studies.

From a comparison of catalogues, it appears that, fifteen years ago, when the system of graduate instruction at Harvard University was still in its infancy, the number of resident graduates was only nine, and the number of undergraduates three hundred and eighty-five. This latter number had remained stationary for the previous eight years, having been three hundred and eighty-one in 1857. During the year just past, the number of graduate students on the roll, most of them study. ing for higher degree, is fifty-one. The number of undergraduates is eight hundred and thirteen, having considerably more than doubled. At Yale College, fifteen years ago, there were no resident graduates. The number of undergraduates was in that year four hundred and fiftyeight. This number was actually less than eight years previously, the total number of undergraduates at Yale in 1856-7 having been four hundred and seventy-two. The catalogue for the present year shows the number in the graduate course to be thirty-nine, and the total of undergraduates to have advanced to five hundred and eighty-one, a gain of more than twenty-five per cent.

At Princeton, fifteen years ago, there were no resident graduates, and the undergraduates numbered two hundred and forty-eight. This college had been for eight years stationary, having had two hundred and thirty-six undergraduates in 1857. During the year just closing, the number of the graduates under instruction at Princeton has been fortyeight, and the total on the undergraduate list four hundred and thir teen, an increase of one hundred and sixty-five, or sixty-seven per cent. The growth of these institutions is the more remarkable from the fact that it is shared with scarcely any of their contemporaries. Bowdoin, Brown, the Wesleyan, Trinity, Middlebury, Union, Hamilton, Madison, and Rutgers are substantially where they were ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago. Williams had two hundred and twenty-four on her list in 1857, and has two hundred and six in 1880. Amherst alone has materially gained, her undergraduate attendance having increased since 1870 from two hundred and fifty-five to three hundred and fortyseven. But Amherst, since 1875, has established the elective system in the junior and senior classes, and has provided for giving advanced instruction to graduates.

The figures here presented require no comment. They prove more conclusively than any argument could do that just in proportion as provision is made in any educational institution for the wants of students of superior grade, in the same proportion its attractiveness is increased for those of the inferior.

COLUMBIA COLLEGE AS A UNIVERSITY.

BY F. A. P. BARNARD, S. T. D., LL. D.

DISTINCTION BETWEEN COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY.*

In popular parlance, the words college and university are so indiscriminately applied, that it has become necessary to define the proper distinction between the two. Going back to the origin of the terms, we shall find that the university of the twelfth or thirteenth century was an educational institution established by decree of the supreme authorities of Church or State, and empowered to give instruction in the Liberal Arts, or in Law, Medicine, or Theology; and also to license such of its own proficients as should satisfy certain tests prescribed by itself to become instructors likewise. It was this licensing power which became the distinctive characteristic of the university. The license was originally bestowed only on those whose purpose it was to become teachers, in fact; and along with the license was imposed the duty of teaching in the university itself. The number of licentiates annually made was, accordingly, in the early history of the university system, very small; being only sufficient to maintain an effective corps of instructors. The numerical strength of this corps was not indeed rigorously fixed, as it is usually in American colleges. Instructors competed with each other in the same field, and their emoluments consisted mainly of the fees of their students. The number was, therefore, as great as under this system could obtain for themselves subsistence; but it necessarily reduced the annual number of licentiates far below that of the students annually completing their course of instruction in the university. The time came at length when licentiates were made without being rigorously required to exercise actually the functions they were licensed to perform. Then the license ceased to be a burden, and became an honorable distinction, becoming known as it is to this day as an academic degree. It does not appear that, during the prevalence of this system, any person not duly licensed by the universities was at liberty to give instruction in the liberal arts or in the studies preparatory to either of the so-called learned professions at all. Certainly no one without such authority might open a school for that purpose. It was a commendable feature of the system that it recognized the educational career as a profession, which was as carefully guarded from the intrusions of the ignorant or inexpert as were the universally acknowledged professions of medicine, law, or theology.

The distinctive characteristic of the original university was, therefore, not the exercise of the teaching function, nor the nature of the subjects taught. Universities were sometimes established in a single

*Report of the President to the Trustees of Columbia College.

r'acuity only, as a Faculty of Theology or a raculty of Law; but they were not universities because they taught Theology or Law or the Liberal Arts. Their distinctive characteristic was the power possessed by them exclusively to license teachers in all these departments of knowledge; and as these licenses came in time to be called degrees, it may be said at present, as in the mediæval period, that, in a technical sense, all that is necessary to make a university is the possession of the degreeconferring power. It follows that, as in bestowing charters on colleges, our American legislatures have invariably accompanied the concession with the power "to give and grant any such degree or degrees to the students of said college, or to any other person or persons by them thought worthy thereof, as are usually granted by universities or colleges now existing," all the more than four hundred chartered colleges of the United States, many of them differing only in name from schools for children of tender age, are equally clothed with university powers, and entitled to assume the honorable title of University.

The colleges, on the other hand, of England and the continent of Europe were originally established to provide for the lodging and subsistence of the university students, without being intended to exercise any educational function at all. They gradually took upon themselves such a function, by making it their business to ascertain, by daily or less frequent examination, how faithfully their inmates were profiting by the teachings of the university. By degrees, in England the colleges have arrogated to themselves all that is necessary to prepare the student to pass the examinations required to secure his degree; and it is entirely possible, and, more than that, is a thing of frequent occurrence, for a student to graduate at Oxford or Cambridge without attending on the course of instruction given by any university teachers at all. It is the university, however, which holds the test examinations and confers the degrees. The power of the college ends with recommending its candidates to the examining board.

But, in the popular idea of our own time, the relation between college and university is by no means such as is here indicated. The distinction between the classes of institutions so designated is understood to be one not of powers but of comprehensiveness. It is understood that while the teaching of the college is confined within a pretty sharply defined limit, the teaching of the university has no definite limit at all; that while the college teaches only some things, the fully appointed university teaches everything; also that an educational institution approaches the ideal of an university in proportion as it transcends the narrow boundary which is supposed to define the proper province of the college.

But the university not only carries on indefinitely the intellectual work which the college begins, but it also bridges over in a variety of directions the wide gap which exists between the ideal world, which is the world of the college, and the actual world of busy life. It has been

made a frequent reproach to the training given by the college, or to what is called a liberal education, that it is wholly impractical, and fails completely to fit a man for any career by which he may hope to gain his daily bread. Nay, it is even said that this kind of training not only fails to fit, but actually unfits men for the work of real life. It draws them gradually away into a world of abstractions, or of truths divested of all utilitarian associations (which it holds in contempt), so that when at last this species of culture has accomplished for them all that it can, they are even less well prepared to make their way in the world than they were before it began. To a certain extent, the imputation here thrown out is well founded; but it is not just on that account to regard it as a reproach. It would be truly a reproach, if it had ever been assumed for a liberal education that its object is to prepare men for the business of life. The object of liberal education is to make the most that can be made of man as man, not as lawyer or physician or carpenter. This being the avowed design, there is implied in it by necessary consequence that when the culture has done its work the man will not be prepared to enter directly upon any special career or vocation, but that he will be capable of adapting himself promptly to such a specialty, and of pursuing it afterwards with a vigor and success which could only be the result of such a previous preparation. In this respect it is with mental as with physical training. As the muscular exercises of the gymnasium do not result in fitting a man and are not intended to fit a man to use with dexterity the carpenter's plane or the stonemason's chisel or the pavior's rammer, but have the effect of solidifying the frame and hardening the muscles and exalting the power of endurance to such a degree as to make it possible for one who has undergone them to become, after a suitable subsequent apprenticeship, a more effective carpenter or mason or pavior than he could otherwise have been, so the mental discipline imparted by the course of instruction in the college, without fitting its subject to enter immediately upon any specific calling, prepares him nevertheless to fit himself for engaging in any chosen department of human activity with a probability of success on which he could not otherwise have been able to count. It is not, therefore, a reproach to collegiate education that it is not practical. It is only a mistake to suppose that it ought to be practical. And those who have assisted to overload the college curriculum with subjects thrust upon it on the ground of their practical utility have only helped to pervert its original and legitimate design, and, so far as they have succeeded, to detract from its efficiency and impair its usefulness. But the error is not only to assume that the education of the college ought to be practical, but, further, to forget that the education of the college is not, and is not intended to be, the completion of the education of the man. There are two stages in this education. The first is subjective; it is to draw out the capabilities of the man himself without reference to any use that is to be made of him, or that he may

make of himself. The second is to adapt the capabilities so developed to that special line of effort into which the work of the coming life is to be directed.

The college is not, therefore, in any proper sense a finishing school. It is a very common error to regard it as such. The youthful graduate is very commonly spoken of as having "completed his education." In a certain sense this is not wholly incorrect. His education is complete as individual man, but as social man it ought to be just about to begin. Those who forget that this supplementary education is yet to be accomplished commit an error which may draw after it serious consequences. This supplementary education in a large variety of forms it is the province of the university to furnish. It may not fulfill every demand of this nature which may be made upon it. If there are any who, after enjoying the benefit of a high intellectual culture, choose to apply the faculties so cultivated to mean and unintellectual pursuits, they will be obliged to find their supplementary education in the difficult school of experience, by serving a kind of preliminary apprenticeship to their selected calling. But to all those who purpose to fulfill the destiny which, in devoting the best years of their life to the acquisition of a liberal education, they have marked out for themselves, the university offers opportunities for passing from the ideal to the practical, from the general to the special, in many different directions; and thus speedily transforms the inexperienced thinker into the active and energetic worker. The university may therefore be described as a school of the professions; but it is more than that. If there are those who, without aiming at a professional career, feel an impulse urging them to devote themselves to the pursuit of truth, by research or investigation in any direction, the university provides them with the aids, the encouragement, and the instrumentalities for carrying out such a purpose also. Universities are therefore not merely schools of the professions, but they are at the same time the fountains and fosterers of the highest learning and the profoundest science of every kind.

men.

It is true that all existing universities do not correspond to this description. The universities of England are not in any proper sense professional schools; and if it may be truly said of them that they foster learning, it has never been equally true that they are similarly propitious to science. They have produced some illustrious scientific Newton stands perhaps without a peer in the scientific annals of all time; yet the astronomy of Ptolemy continued to be taught in Newton's own University of Cambridge for a century after the publication of the Principia had created astronomical science anew. The universities of England have never made it their aim to open to educated men the way to any career of active life, unless it might be perhaps in the church or in the field of statesmanship. They have furnished in the past centuries almost exclusively, and they do in the present very largely, the rulers of Great Britain; and the clergy of the establish