anyhow, and let us make up the deficiencies in the education that their States provide, if necessary.

The BULLETIN OF PHARMACY says in an editorial in the October issue: "If there is any legend writ large in the movement for higher education in pharmacy, it is this: We must go slowly and advance no faster than the conditions warrant, and no further than the development of sentiment permits." In the name of 700,000 children in Illinois, of 650,000 children in Missouri, of hundreds of thousands of children in New York, and of many millions of children in the other States of our Union, who cannot get high school education (not even if they are willing to pay for it, because their States do not provide them with sufficient grammar school instruction to allow them to pass the entrance examinations), in the name of every young man and young woman who wishes to enter the business of pharmacy, and whom the advocates of "one year in high school" would exclude from the business of pharmacy and from colleges of pharmacy-I thank you for that sentence!

What I would do when "the conditions warrant" I cannot say; nor is there any necessity for me to worry about it. I shall be dead and forgotten, long, long before every child in America will have a chance to obtain a free one year's course in a high school. Probably conditions may mature more rapidly if the present system of public school education is changed as previously suggested; when high schools are made strictly preparatory schools for those who want academic education, while the grammar schools are made practical training schools for all who do not want academic training, but a practical business education.

The civilization of New York is more than two centuries older than that of Missouri, but it has not yet arrived at a stage where it is possible "to provide education for every one alike." Progress in the future will undoubtedly be far more rapid than in the past, but we can hardly expect the South and West to do in four or five decades what New York was unable to accomplish in three centuries. None of us who participated in the meeting at Indianapolis will live to see the time when your patriotic wish will be fulfilled, and when the American practice will be "to provide education for every one alike, place it within the grasp of all, encourage them to accept it, help them to attain it, and thus develop a nation of people equipped in the best possible way for the struggles of life."

REGARDING THE GRADUATION REQUIREMENT.

Of course, whenever it is possible, it is advisable for youths who want to enter the drug business to go to a college of pharmacy, because technical skill and knowledge can be better obtained there than in any other place or manner. A full course in a college of pharmacy is the best investment a drug apprentice or drug clerk can make, and he or she will feel well repaid for the necessary outlay by the sense of superior knowledge and standing throughout life.

But there may be some for whom such an education is absolutely unattainable, no matter how much they might wish and long for it. For the sake of these young men and women, let us not demand cast-iron and inflexible laws, that absolutely prohibit any other manner of becoming pharmacists except by going one year to a high school and then obtaining a diploma from a college of pharmacy.

Let us give all young men and women a fair chance!

2. The Positive: High Schools Defended.
BY H. L. TAYLOR,

Of the Education Department, New York State; Secretary of the Ad
Interim Committee of the New York Board of Pharmacy.

I have been requested by the editors of the BULLETIN OF PHARMACY to reply to the foregoing article by Dr. Wall, and to comment on his figures and conclusions. Let us examine his statements seriatim, and, then, without wasting space by quoting the statements themselves, refer to them by paragraphs under his center heads.

FIRST, REGARDING THE STATEMENT THAT THE "GRAMMAR SCHOOLS NEED REFORMING."

Paragraph 1. In Germany the boy who has gone to school for eight years does not know all the subjects he enumerates, if you can believe the time-tables of the elementary schools of Germany. "A General View of the History and Organization of Public Education in the German Empire," by Prof. W. Lexis of the University of Göttingen, published in Berlin in 1904, pp. 99 to 102, gives the time-table of the elementary schools of Prussia, Bavaria, and Saxony, the leading German Not one of these time-tables, "exhibited by way of examples," and comprising elementary schools with six divisions in Danzig, with seven divisions in Hanover, with eight divisions in Berlin, with seven divisions in Munich, and with eight divisions in Dresden, requires either Latin or algebra !

states.

If, however, Dr. Wall refers to the courses of the secondary schools, "real" or “gymnasien," his remark regarding American boys and girls being mentally inferior to the German is inaccurate, for the secondary schools, “gymnasien” and “real,” of Germany are provided for boys and not for girls. Dean Russell, in the new edition of his "German Higher Schools," pp. 419-420, says: "At present, however, the government is engaged in checking the growth of gymnasien for girls

in short, they are in accord with the Emperor's dictum that woman's province is 'küche, kinder, und kirche'-cooking, children, and church. . . The gravest defect in the German school system is the organization which foists distinctions of class and sex. The common schools are for the common people; the 'real' schools are for the middle classes; the classical schools are for the aristocracy; and in secondary education the sexes are kept apart."

Paragraph 2. That the twelve-year plan was foisted upon our American school system by would-be imitators of the German is not true of New York State, as will appear from the following quotation from the "Syllabus for Secondary Schools," p. 1, nor can the statement be accepted for the other States of the Union, if the facts and conclusion of the introduction to Bulletin 24, "Professional Education in the United States-Teaching," are accurate: "At a regular meeting held in the Senate Chamber at Poughkeepsie (N. Y.) February 26, 1788, a report to the legislature was adopted, from which it appears that Erasmus Hall had twenty-six students and Clinton Academy fifty-three [both secondary schools]; that the Principal of Erasmus Hall in conjunction with the trustees had signified a determination that the classical and English departments should be regularly attended to by proper tutors [expert teachers demanded]; that the first of these departments should comprise the Latin and Greek languages, with geography, and the outlines of ancient and modern history [secondary instruction]; that the second

should comprehend the English language, reading, writing, arithmetic, and bookkeeping [elementary instruction]; that the French language should always be taught to those that request it, and elocution be attended to in both departments [electives and English required]." In the written record of this interesting meeting, which was held before the election of the first president of the United States, and before the French revolution, or before Bonaparte had overrun Germany, or before the present German school system had come into existence, we find the substantial outlines of (1) a curriculum for the elementary school, (2) a course of study for students preparing for colleges, and (3) a program of studies adapted to students whose education ends in the secondary school. The same report shows that Columbia college (higher institution) had forty students instructed in the Latin and Greek languages, geography, natural and moral philosophy, and the mathematics (higher education).

"The most discouraging experience" of the professional life of the State superintendent of Texas, quoted by Dr. Wall, sprang from his attempt to reverse history and to establish principles contrary to the genius of a free people and permanently established by development throughout the political growth of the nation. The unhampered development of the schools of the State provides a flexible curriculum; hence this system is pliant, not only providing for rural or sparsely settled communities and for urban or more densely populated regions, but also providing that every student shall find his career entirely open at the top. "Entirely open at the top" suggests upward draft and feeding from the bottom; in other words, vertical circulation is the characteristic of the American school system, instead of the horizontal stratification found among older civilizations.

Paragraph 3. As evidence that the statement I made at Indianapolis is true, read this statement from the New York statute, chapter 542, Laws of 1903: "The sum of $100,000 is hereby appropriated for the payment by the comptroller of the tuition of non-resident pupils from schools in this State not maintaining an academic department (secondary), who shall be admitted to schools maintaining an academic department without other expense for tuition than that provided in this act... that of $20 per year for the school year of at least thirty-two weeks or a proportionate amount for a shorter period of attendance of not less than eight weeks." SECOND, AS TO "SOME FIGURES" PRESENTED BY THIS MODERN

SINON.

Paragraph 1. He increases the attendance at the public schools by including those of the parochial and similar schools, thus getting a magnified divisor.

Paragraph 2. He gives the pupils in the high schools and omits those of the academies, numbering 7680 (see p. 270, "Annual Report of 1906"). He omits all the secondary students of the parochial and similar schools, of the normal schools, of the training classes and training schools of the State, and of the subfreshmen classes of colleges and universities. With this magnified divisor and minimized dividend he draws conclusions in his third paragraph which seem to be ascribed to the report of the Education Department.

Paragraph 4. Regarding graduates, he omits all from the academies, both boys and girls, as well as those from the omitted schools mentioned in the preceding paragraph, and he fails to appreciate that the graduates referred to are those

from the secondary schools maintaining four full years only; the graduates of senior, middle, and junior schools he wholly omits, both of the high schools and of the academies.

Paragraph 5. He enumerates the high schools as though the 417 ascribed were more bona fide high schools than the senior, middle, and junior. The fact is that a New York State "junior" school is a high school of the State maintaining one year of secondary instruction after eight years of elementary work, the "middle" maintaining two, and the "senior" three. He makes no reference to the 104 secondary schools called academies, to the three senior academies, to the 16 "middle," and to the 24 "junior;" so that his 668 high schools of the State should be increased by 141 academies, total 809, to learn the number of secondary schools in New York State in 1905, and still this number does not refer to the schools omitted in paragraph 2 above.

Not only is free tuition available to every high school student in the State, but free transportation is provided in 398 districts.

THIRD, AS TO THE IPSE DIXIT THAT "HIGH SCHOOLS ARE NOT AVAILABLE."

Paragraph 1. The boy from any reason unable to avail himself of the high school advantages of the State may acquire that training in the home or the evening high school, and prove it by the same tests that are applied in the schools— the Education Department's examination (see "handbook" 3). Whether the "equivalent" of the one year in high school is practically nil, or fraudulent and fictitious to evade the law, can easily be determined by referring the question to the "307,941 pupils" whom Dr. Wall, a little farther on, says "tried to pass the examinations from the elementary schools."

Paragraph 2. I am surprised at Dr. Wall's confession of ignorance regarding any phase of education in New York State. Unfortunately for his argument his guess is even wilder than his "facts." Had he known that over half the school population of the State is in one district, a city; that over two-thirds is in 44 districts, also cities; that over half the remainder is in villages of two thousand or more inhabitants, all of which have high schools, he might have guessed that there are a good many children fewer than 600,000 in New York State unable to obtain one year in a high school. Could not a good many of the 600,000 Missouri children whose thanks he voiced have corrected this guess for him by simply leaving off the "overs" and dividing his 1,797,238 by one-half of one-third and found less than 300,000?

Paragraph 3. Had he realized that the city in which over one-half of the school population of the State is found does not use the examination tests referred to for the promotion of its students from the elementary to the secondary schools, and that these examination tests are not obligatory on any of the other districts of the State, he would not have asked any one to "think of it." No such colossal blunder as the statement that in the State of New York only 1.38 per cent of the children attending the schools graduated from the grammar schools in 1905 would have been perpetrated by any person who had read our compulsory education code, 83: "Every child between eight and fourteen years of age, in proper physical and mental condition to attend school, and every such child between fourteen and sixteen years of age not regularly and lawfully engaged in any useful employment or service, shall regularly attend upon instruction." Section 7 says:

"Every boy between fourteen and sixteen years of age who is engaged in any useful employment or service . . . and who has not completed such course of study as is required for graduation from the elementary public schools . . . shall attend the public evening schools . . ."

Let the Chief of the Statistics Division of the Education Department be heard, who is responsible for the statistics of the Annual Report from which "Some Figures" of Dr. Wall were garbled. "After a careful study based on the Annual Reports from the elementary and secondary schools of the State, I estimate that less than 10,000 of the 125,000 students in the secondary schools of the State, public and private, are more than two and one-half miles distant from a secondary school."

The State paid last year $160,361 for the tuition of students from districts having no secondary school. If the average tuition per student were $16 (note the limits in the statute quoted above), then 10,000 students from districts having no high school availed themselves of free tuition in secondary schools of the State.

Is it not clear that the high school is available to every pupil?

FOURTH, AS TO "THE INJUSTICE OF THE HIGH SCHOOL

REQUIREMENT."

Paragraph 1. The length of this article precludes a discussion of the results of New York's graduation prerequisite law in pharmacy.

Paragraph 2. A careful study of New York's compulsory education laws will show that the educators of the State have

secured steady and marked advance for the protection of the children that have been "wronged and discriminated against," not by laws unjust under present circumstances, but by business interests that cannot see beyond labels and trade-marks.

Paragraph 3. Hasn't Dr. Wall grown somewhat since his Indianapolis speech when he claimed to speak for Missouri? Did the securing of a "second Missouri compromise" prove him an ox? or does his next paragraph anticipate the frog's experiment? See Aesop's Fables.

Paragraph 4. In open debate his slurs on Missouri's educational condition were so completely exposed that the resolution he favored was overwhelmingly defeated in the Section on Education and Legislation of the A. Ph. A.

Whether the "second Missouri compromise" was the result of his statistics presented in executive session of the Conference of Pharmaceutical Faculties is of course unknown to those who could not be present. From his discussions with another writer in one of the drug journals it appears that he was driven to embrace and represent other sections than Missouri. In this paragraph he returns to the defense of Missouri, and ignoring the facts adduced in the debate at Indianapolis enters the field of prophecy. In the light of his revealed inaccuracies of present fact is it not safe to conclude that the cause of pharmaceutic education and legislation in the United States will suffer in no particular from his predictions of the future?

Finally, as regards the graduation requirement, in pharmaceutic as in other American education the motto is "Vestigia nulla retrorsum."

A JOKE AND ITS MANIFOLD CONSEQUENCES. T. H. F., located in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, decides to join the ranks of the campfire devotees and tell an incident himself, supplemented with some original "poetry":

While I've often read with interest and amusement the many entertaining and laughable stories appearing from time to time in "Our Bulletin," it never occurred to me before that I might assist in keeping warm the crowd of brother pill men who gather each month around the "Camp-fire." Now, Mr. Editor, don't you think the real reason why so many of us are so backward in coming forward and telling our tale of misery or laughter is simply because we consider the material too commonplace? But, after all, the "trivial round and the common task," while they do not "furnish all we ask," often supply the smile which helps to brighten things wonderfully. This is the conclusion I've come to anyway, and at the risk of having my effusion consigned to the capacious interior of your "waste basket," I shall relate to you an incident which occurred when I was an apprentice in the land of No. 1 Hard.

My fellow apprentice, a downright good "old sort," always ready for a joke, either on himself or

some one else, suggested, one hot summer's day, that we should make a five-gallon jug of Hire's root beer. The motion was "carried unanimously." After mixing the contents of a twenty-five cent bottle of the extract with the necessary ingredients in a five-gallon jug, we came to the conclusion that the addition of a quart bottle of spts. frumenti would aid in giving the beverage an increased adaptability for the palate. Then, to hasten matters, we filled a winchester of the product from the jug, and placed it in the sun to start fermentation more quickly.

Now the doctor, seeing the brown liquid out in the' sun, became curious, but he was told that it was only beer we were making, and that we were anxious it should be ready for consumption as soon as possible. But he was in a playful mood (rather, I should say, a vicious mood, for we found this out later on), and unknown to us he took the winchester into the dispensary and put half the contents of a large bottle of pulv. jalap into our beer, and again put it in the sun.

Now there was a minister, a very jolly, middleaged married man, and a good friend of ours, who lived just behind the drug store. He noticed the bottle, too, and he asked the doctor what it contained-asked him jocularly of course. The doctor

carelessly remarked that he thought it contained some root beer which "the boys" were making.

Well, after some time my chum and I went out and sampled our cerevisia radix. It was very good. The minister, looking from the garden where he was at work, decided after seeing how we enjoyed the drink that it would be a good joke to steal the bottle. So as soon as we were out of sight he took it into the house, after first drinking a good "Haustus" himself, and laughingly invited his wife and some lady friends who were calling to have a "smile" with him.

And so our liquid purgans was passed around. He then replaced the "O Be Joyful" where "old Sol" could beam upon it once more, and-"The tragedy was complete!"

Shall we tell of the pangs which followed,
Of the passings to and fro,

Of pains and cramps and cholera,

From that Pulvis Jalap Co. ?
No, no, we'll keep our secret,

Hold it as something dear,

For we never handle jalap co.

But we think of Hire's root beer.

The moral of the story is a good one, dear old pal,
But should you fail to seize it,

To tell it you we shall.

Whether druggist, Doc, or deacon, Grasp it with all your might,

For 'tis simply this: "If you do drink, Keep your booze out of sight."

THE DOCTOR AND THE BEER.

This exceedingly well-told and amusing story comes to us from a reader who desires his name shrouded in mystery, lest the identity of the hero of the tale may become known:

The Doctor was taking his vacation and had gone up to Maine for some fishing and shooting. Now, the Doctor is not what you would call a drinking man; but occasionally he enjoys a sip of good whisky or beer.

There are rattlesnakes in Maine, and so the Doctor filled his traveling flask with good old Bourbon and packed a couple or three bottles of the same denomination in his trunk, knowing that Maine is one of the States where prohibition prevails and where a man has to make an infernal sneak of himself to get enough whisky to fill a hollow tooth.

As the Doctor is a liberal man, whenever he was out fishing with old Cap'n Hiram Perkins or hunt

ing with Joe Littlefield, the guide, he would offer them a drink whenever he took one himself. Hence it came to pass that one fine day you could see daylight through the bottom of the last bottle of Bourbon.

"Too bad, Cap'n Hiram," groaned the doctor. "I suppose we can't get any of the old stuff in the village, by hook or by crook?"

"Nope; them prohibition laws be all-fired strict up here," said Cap'n Hiram.

"Well," quoth the Doctor, "I would be satisfied with a bottle of cool beer. I've a thirst on me like a 'longshoreman, and my tongue is as dry as a wooden bell-clapper. Know any place where I can exchange good money for good beer?"

"Ye mowt get some over t' Harry the Barber's. Get a shave an' tell him I told ye an' I guess he'll 'commodate ye.

So the Doctor hot-footed it to the barber-shop. Fate was propitious, for nobody was there but Harry. It was in the middle of the week and the natives of Megunquit never think of getting a shave or hair-cut except on Saturdays. The Doctor plumped into the barber-chair, prayed silently for safe delivery from Harry's razor, and Harry started in swatting soap-suds all over the Doctor's face. Some of the soap got into his mouth, making him still more want something to drink, and he blurted out: "Say, Harry, Cap'n Hiram says I could perhaps buy some good, cold beer from you?"

"Surest thing ye know, Doc! Why of course ye can have some good, cold beer."

(The Doctor sees as in a dream the various brands passing in review.).

"Well, then, never mind the shave. I'll pay you for it just the same. Gimme that towel quick," and the Doctor grabbed the towel and wiped the soap off his face. "Now hurry up, Harry! I'm as dry as the Arizona desert."

Harry led the way through a long, dark passage. to a shed in the back-yard. Ah! how nice and cool it felt out there! Shady and pleasant it was, and in a corner a great big ice-box! Ice is plentiful in Maine, notwithstanding the ice-trust. And there, close to the box, was a comfortable big chair!

The Doctor took off his hat and coat, seated himself, mopped his brow, and leaned back with eyes. closed and a "Kiss-me-once-again-my-darling, kissme-as-you-did-before" expression on his face. He heard the opening of the ice-box, felt the stream of