Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 65.djvu/289

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THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE.
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matter of fact more than fifty years old. In 1838 an act was passed by the territorial legislature establishing the University of the Territory of Wisconsin. Practically nothing was done until the state was organized in 1848, when the university was established by the constitution. In 1866 the university was reorganized by act of the legislature, which also provided for uniting with the university the College of Agriculture, endowed with the proceeds of the agricultural college grant given by the United States in 1862. In 1867 the first annual appropriation (about $7,000) was made by the state. This appropriation has been gradually increased to about $300,000. The state has also provided a great group of fifteen or twenty buildings which are beautifully placed on the shore of Lake Mendota. The library building, used also by the State Historical Society and erected at a cost of over.$600,000, is the finest academic building of the kind except that of Columbia. The students number over 3,000, about as many as Yale, Oxford or Leipzig.

Over this great university one of its own graduates and professors will henceforth preside. Dr. Charles Richard Van Hise was born in Wisconsin in 1857 and has been connected with the university since he entered as a student nearly thirty years ago. He is one of the most eminent American geologists, in charge of the pre-Cambrian and metamorphic geology for the U. S. Geological Survey and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Some years since when Columbia and Pennsylvania elected business men to the presidency, it looked as though scholarship might be subordinated to wealth and commercial success in this office. But Stanford chose a zoologist, Chicago a Semitic scholar, Yale an economist, Princeton a historian, California a student of Greek, Johns Hopkins a chemist and Columbia a student of education. Now Wisconsin has selected a man of science, one whose interests and character are far removed from politics or commercialism, an ideal scholar.

THE CHICAGO SCHOOL OF EDUCATION.

The Emmons Blaine Hall of the School of Education of the University of Chicago was dedicated on May 14. This was an event of importance in the history of education and the extension of scientific methods, for it is a step toward making teaching a profession and education an applied science. The University of Chicago has now established a school of education ranking with the professional schools of law and medicine, the first school of this kind being the Teachers College of Columbia University. There are other schools of education and nearly all the larger universities have established departments of education, but Columbia and Chicago are the universities that are leading the way. The two schools had beginnings somewhat analogous. In both cases independent movements for manual training and the less formal education of children have been subsequently taken over by the universities and made into professional schools for teachers with model schools for children attached. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, now president of Columbia University, was the first president and practically the founder of Teachers College, now the Department of Education of Columbia University, and it is especially appropriate that he should have given the oration at the dedication of the Emmons Blaine Hall. Other addresses were made by President Harper, of the University of Chicago; Dr. Jackman, dean of the College of Education; Mr. Bentley, of the Chicago Institute trustees; President Downing, of the New York City Normal College, representing the normal schools of the country; Mrs. Blaine, the donor of the hall, and Professor Dewey, director of the School of Education and head of the Department of Philosophy and