Dean West of the Princeton Graduate School cheers doting parents afraid that their young Gifteds may injure their precious health by too hard study. In forty years only one Nassovian has died of overstudy. Not a single member of the Faculty has so perished, says the Dean, gibing his brother Dons. In the days before universal athletics the pale and rickety "grind" may have existed. Now the man on the honor list is quite likely to have biceps like "the magnificent exaggerations of antique sculpture," and one seldom sees a pining professor unless it be in a Pullman, where he is homesick for his tennis or his golf. Health being assured, what shall our student study? What are the essential studies? Those that "have most surely produced the best results," the Dean tells us, are "mathematics and the classics, fundamental science, modern literature, and at least the elements of political economy. The man who knows these well is a finely educated man."

Finely educated men must be rare. Modern literature is a good-sized world in itself. The mere word "philosophy" stirs the bile of some folks. According to that accomplished humanist-philosopher, George Santayana, it has very largely come to mean "psychology" in the United States. Dean West must remember with delight the distinction attributed to President McCosh: "When two men are talking and one of them understands what the talk is about. that is metapheesics; when neither of them understands it, that is philosophy."

Dean West says the right thing about the elective system. Indeed. the old free and easy days of that are gone. Vain, mostly, is the search for "soft snaps"; and the elective studies are now grouped together at Harvard, for instance into a "coherent body of knowledge," as the Dean advises. With that condition precedent, it should follow that a man will do best in studies he likes best.

Our contemporary collegians, we are told, are inclined to leaf pleasantly through the four years of "haleyon scenes," and only set to work in earnest at the law school or the medical school or the graduate school or sweeping out the office. New York Times.