least three semesters under the philosophical faculty, although enrolled in the medical. Hebrew, as a study in linguistics, is not regarded as a part of theology proper, but the professor of Hebrew is a member of the philosophical faculty. Candidates for orders, by the way, are obliged to master the outlines of Hebrew grammar at the Gymnasium, before entering the University. On the other hand, students who obtain the degree of Ph.D. for studies in history and political economy are examined in certain legal topics, viz.: Institutes, römische Rechtsgechichte, and deutsche Rechts-und Verfassungsgeschichte that is, the history of Roman legislation and constitutional forms in Germany. This would cover nearly two semesters in the legal faculty. The German theory is that no one is qualified to become an historian or an office-holder of the higher grades, who has not an insight at least into the elements of jurisprudence.

Sample Lectures-Curtius and Ritter.

In making my selection of lectures, I was determined by one simple consideration: which of the many distinguished men whom I heard would be likely to teach me the most German. I de cided upon two, about as opposite in manner and substance as can well be imagined: Ernst Curtius, now professor in Berlin, who lectured on Greek Art, and Ritter, since deceased, who lectured on the History of Modern Philosophy.

Curtius, then a comparatively young man, had an energetic and rapid, but very distinct enunciation. As his lectures were to a large extent the analysis and criticism of the remains of Greek art, such as temples, friezes, statues, intaglios, and the like, I judged that the subject itself would not only be interesting and profitable, but that the prints which were passed around the class during the lecture, would give me at least a visible image of what the lecturer was speaking about. I made no attempt to take notes. The chief good that the lectures of Professor Curtius did me was to train my ear day by day to the flow of very rapid and very elegant German. This point, it seems to me, has not been sufficiently attended to. It is one thing to read a work in the privacy and quiet of your own room, but it is quite another to listen for an hour to the same author as the words come fast and warm from his lips. Even if you do not catch at first more than a thought or two here and there, and the body of the discourse sounds as the tangled maze of a symphony does to the uninitiated in music, still you are training your percep tive faculties far more than you are apt to suspect. Both ear and brain are on the stretch, you put forth your best efforts to seize and hold the fleeting breath; in short, you work under pressure, whereas in your room you are apt to dilly-dally over your books, to fall asleep, as it were, for want of outside stimulus. Hearing, of course, does not exclude reading; both are necessary, and the one supplements the other. But I take the liberty of calling especial attention

to the importance of hearing German well delivered, in view of the fact that only too many English and Americans neglect this element of training.

Professor Ritter was the exact opposite of his colleague. He spoke very slowly and deliberately, from full notes, with a mild, almost droning intonation, so that it was possible, even for me, to write down every word. In his lectures, then, I used my pen industriously, and succeeded in making an exact reproduction of the professor's text. This it was my practice to take to my room immediately after the lecture hour, which was from four to five in the afternoon, spending the interval to tea time in going over it again, grammar and dictionary in hand, and writing the translations of words and phrases on the margin and between the lines.

Besides a general knowledge of German, I made one valuable acquisition through Professor Ritter's lectures, to wit, an acquaintance with the vocabulary of abstract and philosophical terms. This, it is well known, is the most difficult part of the language. Our abstract terms are taken from the Latin and Greek, as they are in French, so that the reader who is familiar with their meaning in one language can easily recognize them in the other. All that an Englishman or an American needs to prepare himself for reading a French treatise on art, or science, or history, is a slight knowledge of the pronouns and irregular verbs. It is only where concrete terms come in question, names of objects and things, such as bread, house, dog and the like, that the two languages diverge. These concrete terms in German coincide generally with the English. But the abstract terms have been developed by means of suffixes and prefixes from German root-forms, and cannot be comprehended without an insight into the genius of the language.

THE GERMAN LECTURE SYSTEM.

The lecture system of Germany has been extolled and decried with equal injustice. Like every other system of man's invention, it is confessedly imperfect. One who attends lectures is not necessarily on the road to knowledge, one who lectures is not necessarily wiser or more interesting than a printed book. But taken all in all, I think that it works well. It gives the lecturer an opportunity of revising his own studies and incorporating fresh knowledge; every course of lectures can be made, as it were, a new edition, which is not usually practicable with a printed book. It gives the hearer the ripest fruits of research direct from the investigator himself, it quickens the faculties of apprehension, and stimulates subsequent study and collateral reading. Say what they will, the devotees of the Socratic method will never succeed in arguing the personal element in the lecture-system out of existence.

There are as many different styles of lecturing in Germany as there are different professors. They can all be reduced, however,

under three general categories: the system of dictating everything, the system of dictating part and explaining part, the system of rapid delivery. By the first is meant that plan in pursuance of which the professor reads off the entire lecture at a uniform rate of speed, slow enough to allow his hearers, unless they should be very clumsy writers, to take down every or nearly every word. Under the second system, the professor dictates a paragraph at a time, reading so slowly that his hearers cannot help catching it, and even pausing and repeating, if he should see that any one in the audience is at fault, and then proceeds to comment rapidly and in a colloquial tone upon what has just been dictated. Under the third system, that of rapid delivery, the instructor speaks after the fashion of our public lecturers, aiming more to impress his students, to arouse and stimulate them, than to give them something that they can carry home "black on white." Many of the more popular lecturers on political history or on topics connected with literary history are delivered in this style, especially where the professor can take for granted that his hearers have some previous knowledge, so that his remarks are as it were the novel presentment of an old theme. But in general it may be safely asserted that wherever exact, positive information is to be conveyed, as for instance in law, or in the descriptive and exact sciences, there the only systems followed are the first and the second.

Lectures are usually delivered with what is called tempus, which is emphatically not on time." Tempus, or the "academic quarter," as it is otherwise styled, denotes that a lecture announced, e. g., for ten o'clock, is not begun until ten or fifteen minutes after the hour. The reason for this apparent procrastination is a practical one. It not unfrequently happens that the lecturer, to save the time and trouble of going to and fro between his home and the Collegien-haus, will secure two successive hours for two lectures. Still, it is not desirable to read one hundred and twenty minutes on a stretch; the pause, then, is very opportune, giving the lecturer a chance to rest his voice. But the chief utility of the "academic quarter" is for the students themselves. As many of them have three or four lectures in succession, perhaps in different buildings, the pause enables them to make the transition without inconvenience.

As a rule, a university lecture is a simple, straightforward enunciation of fact or opinion, without any attempt at brilliancy of style. You are seated with a dozen or two or three dozen other young men like yourself, smoking, perhaps, and chatting with your neighbor. The bench on which you sit is hard and uncomfortable, the elevated bench before you is inscribed with all sorts of devices and names, the legacy of former generations. Your pen, ink, and paper are spread out before you. The door opens softly, the form of the lecturer moves quietly across the room and ascends the rostrum,

without preamble, without prelude, the hour's work begins. Meine Herren-Thomas von Aquina sah in der vernünftigen Seele den höchsten Grad der weltlichen Dinge (Thomas Aquinas regarded the rational soul as the climax of things earthly.) The lecturer has simply resumed where he had broken off the day before. I have listened to lectures by many different professors, in different universities, but I cannot truthfully say that I have ever heard one that could be called brilliant. The aim of a German professor is not so much to arouse or interest or even persuade his hearers, as to teach them. The substance of his discourse is the unfolding of truth, grave, solid truth. But by far the ablest lecture that I have ever heard, in Germany or at home, was one delivered by Vangerow. Happening to be in Heidelberg on a visit in October, 1864, I profited by the occasion to hospitiren with the then most prominent jurist in Germany. The subject was thoroughly familiar to me, as I was at the time in full preparation for my examination at Göttingen, which came off a few weeks later. The auditorium was crowded-there could not have been much less than two hundred students present-but the silence and attention were profound. Seated on a small raised platform near the center of the room, the lecturer spoke for an hour and a half in an easy, clear, sustained voice, without pause and without break, on one of the most complicated points in Roman Law. He had no notes, not even a schedule, only a slip of paper, on which were written one or two references to passages to be cited from the Digest; yet the ideas and words came forth as clear and logical and well placed as if the lecturer were reading from a printed book. The subject was one which the German spirit delights to develop after the I, A, I, a, a, ß. ↑ . . . style, in all sorts of main and subsidiary paragraphs, with minor and modifying clauses, exceptions, qualifications, and reservations, references to foot-notes and the like. But the lecturer had such an insight into and such a grasp of his subject that his discourse seemed to be nothing else than the easy, spontaneous process of organic evolution; it seemed to grow of itself out of his brain. There was no brilliancy, no flight of eloquence, no outburst of humor or sarcasm; the lecture would scarcely have been intelligible to one not familiar with the study. But it was a masterly, didactic statement of the clear, crystalline truths of the law, introducing nothing superfluous, omitting nothing necessary, and putting everything in the right place.

...

The paper used for taking notes is of a peculiar kind. A German student rarely if ever has what we call a notebook or a copy-book. He uses those called Pandecten or Collegienpapier, plain, white writing-pa per, unruled; the page varies in size, but is generally what bookpublishers designate as lexicon-octavo untrimmed. Six or eight sheets (twelve or sixteen pages) are stitched together at the back, making a Heft. The Heft, before it is sold, is put under a press of which the face is smaller than the face of the page. This blocks out i

indentation a sort of inner page, leaving a wide margin. The inner page alone is used for writing in the lecture-hour; the margin is reserved for subsequent corrections and additions. At the end of the semester, the Hefte of any one course can be bound up in a volume for preservation. The advantages of this paper are that it enables the student to dispense with an armful of cumbersome note-bookshe has only to carry as many Hefte at a time as he has separate lectures to attend and prevents the waste of paper. In buying a note-book, the student runs the risk of getting one either too small or too large; but with the Pandectenpapier, he has only to add a Heft from time to time, and he can also intercalate as long as the Hefte are unbound. It has always been a matter of surprise to me that the Pandectenpapier has not been introduced into our American colleges. It is by far the most practical method of taking notes. The Hefte are carried in a small black leather portfolio (Mappe), just large enough to hold three or four at a time, and flexible enough to be rolled up and carried conveniently under the arm. The notes are always written in ink. The inkstand generally used is not flat bottomed, as with us, but terminates in a sharp point of iron, which can be thrust into the desk. When carried in the pocket, the point is protected by a capsule of horn that screws over it.

The conduct of the students during the lecture-hour is propriety itself. One might attend hundreds of lectures in different universities, without witnessing any disorder or whispering. The first attempt to create such disturbances as disgrace the halls of our colleges would be punished by the summary expulsion of all the offenders. To an American faculty, the discipline in the German universities will appear lax in more than one respect. There are no chapel-services, no marks, no tutorial supervision. The student is free to live where and as he pleases, his movements are unfettered. But whatever else the University may wink at, it never tolerates disorder and disrespect in the lecture-room. The student is treated as a man having a sense of propriety and duty. If he does not like a particular professor, he can hear another; if he does not like a particular university, he can go elsewhere. If he does not feel disposed to attend on a particular day he can stay away. But if he attends, he is expected to conduct himself as in all respects a man.

The German student, however, has one privilege which the Amercan has not: he can manifest his wishes by scraping his feet on the floor. If a professor lectures too fast or fails to explain a point to the complete satisfaction of his hearers, or if he lectures over the hour, instantly you will hear three or four pairs of shoes at work. This hint is always taken by the professor in good part. With regard to lecturing over the hour, the practice varies. Where the students know that the course is a heavy one, in which the professor has need of all the time he can get, they are not so apt to interrupt, unless the time of "grace" should exceed five minutes.