The stress and the high pressure of modern life is felt nowhere more keenly than in the field of higher professional education. On all sides the demand is heard for a wisely simplified curriculum, for a longer term of study, for methods that will bring the ever-widening field of knowledge to be covered within the range of the personal observation and induction of an ever-multiplying number of students. To meet the difficulties of the case, educational reforms have taken place all along the line. Teaching is becoming always more objective, illustrative, the didactic method more colloquial—socratic. The student is called on to produce, even more than to acquire, to enquire, to debate, and to himself form judgments on the facts of his own observation. The laboratory system, in short, with the symposium, is replacing the lecture room and the thesis.
Nowhere are these new