The test brings up at once the question whether an examination in English literature is likely to be a test of the brain in a proper sense of the word. Memory is a mental function, and it is more or less inevitable that the student with the best memory is going to show the best answers to such a test. The young men, that is to say, did their bust not so much to tell what they thought or to show how they could think as to tell about thinkers and show that they remembered of what thinkers have thought. That is undoubtedly a brain test Whether it is the ideal test of brain power is another matter.

None of the young men, it is probable, produced any literature within the same space of time allowed for the examination. For any of them to have done so would have been so phenomenal as to upset the assumptions under which the test was planned in the first instance. For that matter, if Yale and Harvard could at will turn out young men prepared to produce literature on short notice the whole prestige of literature as a rare art would be gone. Pallas News