train and shipped back home, while the Duchess and I, missing his companionship, shook the dust of Iowa from our treads and prepared to tackle the mud farther west.

V

From Iowa I worked north to Minnesota, then turned westward once more along the Yellowstone Trail. I was totally unprepared from anything I had seen or read to find the wheatfields of the Dakotas so thrilling. An ocean of soft gold and mellow violets, caressed into motion by faint breezes and traversed by majestic shadowships! An ocean more perfect in the quality of its color-harmonies than an Atlantic or Pacific, and saved from mere prettiness by its magnitude. In spite of the bad roads, tire troubles, and a high wind that blew out all my windows, I remember the days spent in crossing these States as some of the pleasantest experienced along the way.

I made friends with the Indians on the Northern reservations and found them more picturesque than I had been led to believe. Although they have succumbed to an extensive use of our hideous male habiliments, they still retain enough love of color and ornament to save them from lapsing into the monotone of the whites. The women have even profited in many cases by a gypsylike use of full, brilliantly dyed skirts and gay kerchiefs, although there are injudicious ones among them who verge on burlesque - such as, for instance, the maiden I encountered who wore an emerald-green silk shirt, pink knickers, and brown shoes and stockings.

It is strange that we have had no really fine paintings of our Indian life. Certainly there is no more picturesque figure-material to be found; yet, in spite of the fact that there is a

group of painters who devote their entire time to depicting our aboriginal race, we get nothing but a weakly decorative type of canvas more suited to be used as backgrounds for groups at the Natural History Museum than as genre paintings of artistic importance. I have never, in standing before one of these Indian pictures, been made to feel that the painter had a deeply sincere understanding of or sympathy with his subjects such as, for instance, one feels on viewing Millet's peasants, Zorn's bathers, the aristocrats of a Gainsborough, or the music-hall performers of a Degas.

Of the many States I have traveled through in my search for Beauty, Montana reigns supreme with mewhich statement has nearly cost me my life in California. Running, as it does, from the gray plains of sage- and rabbit-brush, through verdant rivervalleys bordered by green-swept hills, to those most exquisite examples of mountain loveliness within the confines of Glacier Park - it is a symphony of endless fascinating variations. Nowhere can Yellowstone approximate the ethereal melody of Lake Bowman, toward which I had to urge the complaining Duchess over a fearful road that guards the beauty from the usual asphalt-loving tourist.

My few attempts at mountain scenery were not entirely successful, and I again came to the conclusion that it does not form good painter's material. Our pigments are too earthy, our techniques not subtle enough to entrap the evanescent moods and intangible loveliness of mountain woodlands and lakes. Perhaps it is just as well not to challenge Nature at her best - she has plenty of commonplace moments with which to vie.

Feeling this, I was content to roam on foot or on horseback over these royal hillsides, or, sitting beneath a

giant fir, to lose myself in contemplation of some lake unruffled by my gaze. But this feeling of incompetency was not a justifiable excuse for my inaction, it appeared, for on the few occasions when I dared to wield a brush I disposed of the results, unsatisfying as they were, with surprising ease.

As a grand finale to the pilgrimage across Montana, my path into Idaho led through almost a hundred miles of virgin forest, so superb in height, so grandiose in conception, as to make our Eastern ones seem very puny indeed. I think back upon them now with more pleasure than upon the California redwoods, for the latter are tremendous egoists that have stamped out other forms of vegetation, leaving in place of the rich pattern of tangled undergrowth beloved by all woodsmen only a brown waste as barren as a wellworn campground. The nights I spent beneath those awesome Northern trees, a full moon picking out their regal old trunks with her light and bathing an occasional snooping bear in a pool of phosphorescence, - those nights will rank with the most spectacular of happy reminiscence.

--

As September advanced and the threat of snow became more ominous, I pushed on through the Rockies and the Coast Range to the Pacific at Seattle. From there, now following the shore line, now bearing back into the big-timber country for a glimpse of a national park, I drifted southward. For the first time I found my old love, the ocean, disappointing. Though still fascinating in its changing moods, its surging life, and its easily whispered promises, it seemed not so beautiful as I had hitherto found it. The color was often monotonous, often too pretty, and my eyes missed the endlessly

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varying mountain shapes over which they had been roving with such infinite pleasure.

Reveling in it all, I gradually worked my way into California, until one fine October day I entered Oakland and crossed by ferry to San Francisco. As the Duchess sputtered merrily over the steep grades in this picturesque American city, I thanked her affectionately for the splendid fashion in which she had accomplished the arduous journey. For, although we spent many more pleasant days together in rambling about California, this was our virtual objective, the attainment of which fulfilled my most sanguine hopes.

I said good-bye to my car somewhere in Los Angeles. Business in the East called and, although the Duchess had been the most faithful of mistresses, there was no way of taking her back with me. Besides which she had a serious internal complication that might at any moment evolve into a death rattle. I drove her to the establishment of a secondhand dealer the day I planned to leave.

'How much is she worth?' I demanded hopefully. 'Forty dollars.'

I drove to another place.

'What will you give me for the outfit?' I inquired, less hopefully.

'Forty dollars,' was the reply.
I decided to try strategy.

'Bah,' I said, as I stepped on the starter, 'I was offered fifty-five down the street.'

'Wait a minute, partner. She looks like a pretty good Lizzie. I'll give you sixty."

'Sold,' said I, and, giving the wheel a final affectionate squeeze, I pocketed the money and headed for the station on foot.

colleges, graduate schools, professional schools, correspondence courses, and extramural classes, which, characteristic product of democratic conditions as they are, are borne along by forces perhaps beyond their control in the endeavor to be of service to all classes of the community.

II

The story of higher education in America has been often told and may for my present purpose be briefly summarized. The American college was in origin an adaptation of the English college in scope practically a secondary school for the economically advantaged or for prospective lawyers, clergymen, and physicians. A fringe of poor students burning with the desire to learn was, however, always in evidence, in the old home as in the new. Increase of knowledge, increase of wealth, the spread of democracy, naïve faith that knowledge and power, education and intelligence, go together, resulted in the rapid expansion of the American college. New colleges were established in unprecedented numbers

by local communities, by states, by religious organizations, by individuals anxious to be remembered or inspired by the desire to pay the future for the advantages which a rich, new, wideopen country had bestowed upon them. No such rapid and extensive develop ment could in a brief period have possibly been sound or homogeneous; that must necessarily be a matter of time. Meantime complications arose. The local high school developed. That displaced the college in the scale of values. It forced the college to be more than a secondary school. But the high schools themselves were uneven and unexacting; hence the displaced and elevated colleges had, to a large and varying extent, to be high schools still. They

could not discard the type of teaching and discipline proper to a secondary school, though in age their students were fairly beyond the secondary stage. Moreover, the combination of unexampled prosperity, faith in education, and love of fun enormously increased college attendance, so that administrative problems quickly arose such as could be managed only by mechanism often harmful and inappropriate to students approaching one-and-twenty. These considerations explain certain characteristic features of American colleges colleges their number, their rapid increase in size, the unevenness of the student body, their lack of intellectual seriousness, their overlapping with the high schools, the excessive regimentation which holds students to a strict accounting, only to find that every formal requirement can be regularly fulfilled by essentially uneducated boys and girls.

So much for the troubles due to confusion of high school and college. Meanwhile, at the far end, another set of problems arose. Within the last century a new passion has been fanned into flame. There have always been searchers for truth, sometimes in religious brotherhoods, sometimes in academic communities, sometimes alone: Roger Bacon was, for example, a Franciscan monk, not entirely approved by his associates and superiors; Galileo was a heterodox university professor; Francis Bacon a lawyer, politician, and grafter; Franklin a printer; Mendel a priest; Charles Darwin an English gentleman. Students and investigators, each in his own way, these exceptions were in their day left to their own devices. Thus, as long as it was a rare hobby, investigation did not upset existing educational institutions.

But difficulties arose when research became general, as it has become

increasingly so within the last hundred years. After centuries of effort by isolated and unappreciated thinkers, men became aware of its importance and fascinations; research has almost become a fashion. An experimental and investigative technique capable of use on a large scale has been worked out in linguistic, mathematical, and scientific fields. The persons affected by this intellectual epidemic required certain conditions-places in which to places in which to work, books, apparatus, contacts, assistants, pupils, means of publication. The European universities, in which from time to time original workers had always appeared, - plastic and loosely organized as they were in most respects, lent themselves rather easily to this new purpose; in America the college was forced to broaden its scope so as to accommodate advanced training and research at the far end. The American college was thus a high school at its beginning and a university toward its end. This looks complicated enough; the situation is, however, more complicated than it looks. For the three types of school-high school, college, and graduate school-are so intertwined that it is impossible to say what is high school, what is college, and what is university. Students, courses, and teachers are all involved in all three.

Specific dates are apt to be misleading. There have been investigators and scholars of high rank in old-fashioned American colleges Agassiz at Harvard, Willard Gibbs at Yale, before either institution consistently thought of itself as a university in its present sense. But research was not recognized

in America as one of the dominant concerns of higher education until the flag was nailed to the mast on the opening of Johns Hopkins University in 1876. Then for the first time an entire group of men were called to professorships because they were distinguished or

promising contributors to knowledgeGildersleeve in Greek, Sylvester in mathematics, Rowland in physics, Remsen in chemistry, Newell Martin in biology, Haupt in Hebrew, Bloomfield in Sanskrit, Herbert Adams in history and institutions; and, later, Welch in pathology, Mall in anatomy, and so forth.

These scholars and scientists were grouped together as a graduate or university faculty; the seminar, the thesis, and the Ph.D. degree were imported from Germany; it was the avowed object of the university to increase the sum of knowledge, to train young men to do likewise, and to send them forth to spread the gospel. Few gospels have in so brief a period done so well. Johns Hopkins has itself produced a good-sized army of advanced teachers; its graduate school has been freely imitated; its professional schools have set up new standards toward which the rest of the country has rapidly moved.

But there was a fly in the ointment. I have spoken of the graduate school of Johns Hopkins University. Johns Hopkins University was not simply a graduate school; it too had from the outset an undergraduate department. President Gilman and his counselors were really interested in graduate work, in the university idea; but, alas, the colleges of that date were in the main conventional secondary schools, far below the standard of the secondary schools which in Europe fed the universities. There was hardly a college

in the United States which in 1876 was

adequately equipped to teach physics, chemistry, biology, history, and economics, and it was in these branches that the Johns Hopkins of that day proposed to cultivate research and to train investigators. Where were the graduate students to come from? There were, especially in science and