Any movement which puts the special advantages of the various departments of the University at the service of the Graduate School, for purposes of advanced study or research, necessarily widens the scope of the School's usefulness. It is quite conceivable that study in some of the professional schools may be carried on in purely scientific lines without reference to any practical application, professionally, in after life. Now the purpose of the Graduate School being to offer opportunities for advanced work and to give credit for such work without any limitation of its field other than the actual number of fields for study which the Faculty of Arts and Sciences affords, it is obvious that any new field of pure science which may be brought within the range of the School, and which may be pursued for the advanced degrees, adds just so much to the capacity of the School. It is probable that before long arrangements will be made whereby students of the Graduate School may get degrees for advanced work done in the Medical School. In his report to the President for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Dean Peirce alludes to this subject and gives this significant vote of the Faculty passed at the end of the last academic year: "that there be added to the Committee on Honors and Higher Degrees in the Division of Natural History representatives of those departments of the Medical School wherein studies of a scientific non-professional kind are prosecuted; and this with the intention of providing an arrangement whereby students registered in the Graduate School and studying in the Medical School may proceed to the degrees of Ph. D. and S. D." Dean Peirce suggests that the same principle might be applied in suitable cases to the departments of Law and Theology as well as of Medicine. President Eliot is evidently influenced by an idea not altogether dissimilar when he deduces from the success of the Divinity School as an undenominational institution, the fact "that a theological department, conducted on scientific principles, may be a consistent and altogether desirable branch of a free university."