Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/316

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
Guyot Hall.

gradually developed at Princeton in the course of the past few years, and there is likely to be now a mutation which will place the university among those where productive scholarship and creative research are most cultivated. The difficulties in regard to the graduate school which have been so widely exploited are in fact rather trivial and are now fairly solved, as the university has not only money for a residence hall but also for the men who are the real university. The Swan bequest of $300,000, the gift of $500,000 from Mr. Proctor, once withdrawn but now renewed, and the Wyman bequest, amounting probably to over $2,000,000, are all for the graduate school and give it a free endowment scarcely equaled at any other university.

Like all our institutions Princeton has spent relatively too much money on buildings and too little on men. But the money has come freely and the architectural setting at Princeton will appeal to the alumni and to the general public as the worthy exterior manifestation of a great university. It is also true that Princeton has done much for its men. In the preceptorial system it has undertaken to extend the personal contact between teacher and student which is one of the most marked advantages in the teaching of the sciences, to the departments not having laboratories, and has brought to Princeton some fifty selected men of the younger generation with the rank of assistant professors. The method adopted may be open to certain criticisms, but this group of men has added greatly to the strength of the university. In the meanwhile the laboratory departments have been developed both by buildings and by men. The department of physics has been made one of the strongest in the country and one of our leading zoologists has been called as head of the department of biology.

The buildings recently erected for physics and for natural science are shown in the accompanying illustrations. In both of them the academic Gothic style has been well adapted to laboratory construction. The Palmer