and say: 'This much earth is enough.' He just doesn't know what to do!" Then God blessed the bee and commanded that its wax should serve to illumine weddings and funerals and its honey should heal the sick. In the Rumanian Sage the bee goes to the wise hedgehog for advice and the hedgehog says: 'Plainly God does not know that he must create mountains and valleys to make room for the waters." The Setts say (p. 128): As the earth was created it did not fit under the arch of heaven. Where shall one put such a great disk? Just then the hedgehog came along and asked what the trouble was. "Verily the earth is done, but we can not get it under the arch of heaven and it would not do to break a piece off." "That's nothing," said the hedgehog, "You must squeeze the disk together a little and then it will go." Good: God quickly pressed the disk together and it was easy to stick it under the heaven. Now there appeared here and there, by the pressure, wrinkles which are the present mountains and valleys. God gave the hedgehog, for his shrewd head, an excellent coat, all of needles, so that no enemy can get near him. THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE THE MEDICAL SCHOOL AND THE agrees with him in wanting to base the COLLEGE THE marble palaces which American millionaires have built for the Medical School of Harvard University are justified by their beauty. They will house part of the meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the affiliated societies during convocation week at the end of the present month, and it would be worth while for scientific men from a distance to attend the meetings if their only object were to see these beautiful and stately halls. But these buildings have not solved the complicated problems of medical education; they have, to a certain extent, fossilized the system of sequestering the medical school from the university. Reinforced cement at Cambridge might have accomplished more for training and research in the medical sciences than marble on the Boston fens. President Eliot appears to be in large measure responsible for separating the medical school from the university both in space and time. Shortly before his retirement, he appointed a dean of the school who to a certain extent shares his views. Dean Christian, in his address at the dedication of the Medical Department of Stanford University, said that the institutions which have adopted a combined academic and medical course "have succeeded in rendering the A.B. degree of less value and significance than formerly and have sacrificed one or two years of college work while seeking to conceal this fact by the award of the two degrees, A.B. and M.D." President Lowell, who does not hesitate to express educational theories at variance with those of his predecessor, professional schools on the college, and apparently would have the professional schools so ordered that "every college graduate ought to be equipped to enter any professional school." In his inaugural address he says: "Our law school lays great stress upon native ability and scholarly aptitude, and comparatively little upon the particular branches of learning a student has pursued in college. . . . Many professors of medicine, on the other hand, feel strongly that a student should enter their school with at least a rudimentary knowledge of those sciences, like chemistry, biology and physiology, which are interwoven with medical studies; and they appear to attach greater weight to this than to his natural capacity or general attainments." It may be doubted whether in the Harvard Medical School or elsewhere there are professors who attach greater weight to rudimentary knowledge of certain sciences than to natural capacity and general attainments. But there are those in the Harvard Medical School, as appears from an extended article filling half the Harvard Bulletin for November 3, who do not approve the attitude of the administration in determining the relation between the college and the medical school. It is there argued that students in the college should be permitted to study in the college the sciences required by the medical student, as they now can the sciences preliminary to engineering, and that it should be possible for the student to complete both his college work and his medical course in six years. President Lowell apparently wants a four-year college course, followed by a medical course which can not count | ence, and the foremost zoologist of on any special knowledge on the part Japan. of the student-it should in this case be five years-and this must be followed by a year or two in the hospital. Students are on the average over eighteen years old when they enter Harvard, and the physician would not begin to practise medicine and to learn what can only be taught by practise until he is nearly thirty. To this late start in life there are serious objections both educational and economic. It may be that the local separation of the medical school from the rest of the university which obtains at Harvard and also elsewhere, as at Columbia and the Johns Hopkins, may ultimately lead to greater independence on the part of the medical school. In this country we find that medical schools were usually started as independent institutions which later became parts of universities. This was a great advance, for the medical schools were largely proprietary institutions whose standards were lower than in the university. But it is perhaps now true that the spirit of scholarship and research is more advanced in the medical school than in the college. When a medical school is sufficiently well endowed and its professors are men devoted to research, it is probable that it would be best for it to take charge of the education of students after they leave the high school, whether their period of instruction is to be four years or ten. The resources of the college and the graduate schools could be fully used, but men engaged in medical practise, teaching and investigation should be responsible for the education required by physicians and by those preparing to undertake research work in the medical sciences. KAKICHI MITSUKURI, 1858-1909 IN Tokyo on September 16, after a long illness, died Kakichi Mitsukuri, professor of zoology in the Imperial University, dean of the college of sci Any one might safely have predicted that Mitsukuri would succeed. For he came from stock which was both intellectual and energetic. For generations his family had produced prominent scholars, especially physicians, and I recall that one of his forefathers had learned the Dutch language and was translating works in surgery and anatomy in the days of the early Tokugawas, when such exotic studies were punishable with death. And it came to pass that this family with its tradition of western learning pushed to the front in the enlightened upheaval of the restoration. And that of its youngest members Mitsukuri and two of his brothers were among the scholars who sought the training of foreign universities. They were better by one than par nobile fratrum, those young Mitsukuri, and if they could have looked from their ship into the waters of the future they would have seen themselves high in the counsels of a new and national university, one of them a dean of a college, another a peer, a minister of education, and a president of a university. Mitsukuri Kakichi, as he is known in Japan, owed his training largely to the United States. He received his first foreign education in Hartford—he was then but a boy and was in the care of the Misses Goldthwaite, to whom his gratitude was ever almost filial. In 1875 he entered the Sheffield Scientific School, and took his degree of Ph.B. in 1879. The same year he matriculated at Johns Hopkins and studied with Brooks and Newell Martin for four years. In 1881 he became fellow in biology and he took his degree (Ph.D.) in 1883. It may be mentioned that his thesis "On the Gills of Nucula " has not fallen into the limbo of forgotten dissertations. In his Hopkins days he was an enthusiastic frequenter of the Chesapeake laboratory, and was an intimate of his fellow students, Fessenden Clark, Sedgwick and Wilson. For zoology in Japan Mitsukuri did these things: He directed the upbuilding of the zoological and, to a certain degree (as dean of the science college), the scientific work of the university; he organized zoology in Japan, making his department its focus, not only in technical matters but popular and semi-popular as well; he was the moving spirit in sending zoological expeditions throughout Japan from Sagahalin to the Liu Chiu islands-even to Tai Wan; he was conspicuous in founding and developing the Misaki Biological Station; he was potent in building up a fisheries bureau, officered After this he traveled in Europe, vis- I have still the feeling that the Japited universities, English and conti- anese looked upon him as somewhat nental, and thence returned to Japan. too progressive. He admitted foreignThere he arrived at an opportune ers among his most intimate friends, moment: the department of zoology he had rooms in his house in foreign which had been organized by Morse style, and his family took its place in and given a second bent by Whitman, social gatherings in the same informal was in a state of upheaval. Japan in way as in America or Europe. And he general was then beginning to assert could think as a foreigner, and he cerher intellectual rights: from the im-tainly could write as one, for his Engported foreigners it had learned nearly lish never betrayed him. And he had all it felt the need of, and in this a wide circle of correspondents for instance there seemed no reason why whom he was constantly doing, and one branch of the educational work with the greatest courtesy, troublesome should not be carried on entirely by favors. Japanese. Mitsukuri entered into the work with his new training, and with a knowledge of Japanese diplomacy and breeding and obligations which no foreigner, at least in those days, had mastered. So it came about that the department of zoology began a new development, and in this work Mitsukuri would be the first to testify how much he owed to his trusted associate, Professor Iijima, and his other colleagues. Mitsukuri devoted much of his life in Japan to his numerous pupils, sacrificing to no little degree his research work. He was tireless in his attendance at the university, accessible at all times, and with an affectionate friend-it with his pupils and contributed to liness which no one appreciates more its publications; he gave an important keenly than a Japanese. "I feel I stimulus to the pearl industry in have lost a parent," writes Dr. M. Japan and furnished numerous ideas And this is the common sentiment to the culturists who sought to proamong his pupils. His attitude was duce natural pearls by artificial ideal: he was frank, inspiring, uncom- means; and last of all he lifted up the promising when a question involved position of zoology throughout the accuracy or scientific purpose. "How country by means of his many-sided different," he would say, "is the train-teachings and by means of the influing of the diplomat and the scientist-ence exerted in his behalf by many the one studies to dress up the truth, friends in all stations. In this regard the other to expose it naked." in it has often been said he had not a spite of his long years of foreign train- few personal attributes of our own ing "because of it," he would perhaps Professor Baird. have said), Mitsukuri was intensely Japanese-patriotic to his finger-tips, alert to point out the advantages of his country's ways, but like Okakura, so skilful in his dissection of the failings of his foreign friends that they never minded the pain. None the less, His researches cover many branches of zoology. At the time of his death he was completing a monograph of the holothurians of Japan. "We must do systematic work," he said in mock apology, "for you know that nearly everything we find here is new, and it |