The experiment which has been tried since its foundation by the Johns Hopkins University of providing special instruction in the higher branches, especially to graduate students of other colleges, is one of peculiar interest and value. With its magnificent endowment, this institution has been enabled to offer privileges for the study of specialties not strictly professional which no other university of the country has been able to equal. It is very evident that a university on the plan of Harvard, with its comparatively limited funds and with its multifarious schools and extensive academical department, cannot hope to afford such instruction to graduate students of the liberal arts and sciences as Johns Hopkins, with its narrower and more limited range. Therefore the institution of the latter university, in a field where it could perform a work peculiarly its own, was an event full of importance.

A controversy, however, has arisen recently over the very nature of this foundation, and, strange to say, a nephew of the founder of Johns Hopkins University is the one most strenuous in condemning the policy of the present board of trustees. "President Gilman's plans," this gentleman claims, "have so far resulted in one or two discoveries by one or two of his professors which were, doubtless, appreciated by the most learned people here and abroad, and his plans have served to further educate already well educated post-graduates of Northern colleges who come here, secure paying fellowships, avail themselves of all the advantages extended for our near neighbors and then, securing positions elsewhere, leave us. With forty-one professors and an income of $225,000, we should be educating a thousand instead of two hundred." All of which seems merely to neglect the argument that it is in this very opportunity for the highest training not obtainable elsewhere that the pre-eminent usefulness of such an endowment as that of Johns Hopkins consists.