The books tell us of 20,00 students at mediaeval Paris, Oxford, Padua. Possibly the registration system wasn't as accurate as Columbia's. Last year she had 19,094 students, or more than 13,000, if the summer sessioners be counted out. The teaching staff has 959 members. The original faculty, the whole corps of instructors, in the good old Colony times and beginnings of King's College, was its first President, Dr. Samuel Johnson, and his undergraduates were eight. In our own time Columbia has grown gigantically. She is become a great national and cosmopolitan university.

President Butler says in his annual report that the university must have $30,000,000 if it is within a reasonable time to accomplish satisfactorily the tasks that are now laid upon it. It must have $12,000,000, and this is its most immediate need, to carry out the plan, in which the Presbyterian Hospital shares, for a medical centre and a graduate school of medicine and surgery. For the development by graduate instruction and original research in science, for the improvement of the public health and the mastery of obscure diseases, such an institution would be invaluable. A word to the wise millionaires, to all the forehanded wise, should be sufficient.

The Law School needs a million, a couple of millions is wanted to increase equipment, material and staff for research in philosophy, political and pure science. Many salaries should be raised to keep distinguished professors at the university and deliver promising young men from the temptation of business offers far superior to their scanty pay. The library, the university press, various objects undertaken, or that ought to be $30,000,000. May Columbia get it, in large sums and in small, and on short notice! --New York Times.