Are students attracted to Harvard by the fame of particular instructors? In our opinion, a negative answer can be safely given to this query which brings up a distinctive feature of American and English universities as compared with German institutions. In Germany students are attracted by the peculiar brilliancy of some one instructor or department; men go to hear Helmholtz, or Virchow or some equally celebrated professor - not to attend the particular university. In England and America, a student selects the university in which he expects to find the best general efficiency, in which he sees the best scholarship in all the departments, not the one in which some one department may be of surpassing worth and the others of inferior merit. On the whole, the American system in this respect is to be preferred, unless a man desires to study a specialty. It should be the aim of a university first to make all its departments thorough and scholarly and then to collect the brilliant men of the country around the nucleus already formed. Men go to Harvard and Yale because they believe that at those institutions they will find the best general faculty and methods of teaching, although in some one department they may feel that some other college is superior. Brilliant professors die but thoroughly organized systems do not. It is the policy of the Berlin University at present to collect all the leading professors of Germany with its faculty. In the end it will be in Germany as in England and America; Berlin will be the national university and the remaining institutions will degenerate into local affairs.