ause his school friends are going there; on account of the prestige
of the place; sometimes, too, because one is considered more
democratic than another; sometimes, and perhaps more often than we
think, on account of the athletics; because it is large or small; or
on account of the cost.

The German youth, owing to widely different customs and ideals,
chooses his university for other reasons. If he be of the well-to-do
classes, and his father before him was a corps student, he is likely
to go first to the university, where his father's corps will receive
him and discipline him in the ways of a corps student's life, and
rigorous ways they are, as we shall see. Young men of small means, and
who can afford to waste little time in the amusements of university
life, go at once where the more celebrated professors in their
particular line of work are lecturing.

Few students in Germany reside
during their whole course of study at one university. The student year
is divided into two so-called semesters. The student remains, say, in
Heidelberg two years or perhaps less, and then moves on, let us say,
to Berlin, or Goettingen, or Leipsic, or Kiel, to hear lectures by
other professors, and to get and to see something of the best work in
law, theology, medicine, history, or belles-lettres, along the lines
of his chosen work.

One can hardly say too much in praise of this
system. Many a medical, or law, or theological, or philosophical
student, or one who is going in for a scientific course in engineering
or mining, would profit enormously could he go from Harvard to Yale,
or to Johns Hopkins, or to Princeton, or to Columbia, and attend the
lectures of the best men at these and other universities. Many a man
would have gone eagerly to Harvard to hear James in philosophy, Peirce
in mathematics, Abbot in exegesis, or to read Greek with Palmer; or to
Yale to have heard Whitney in philology in my day; or now, to name but
a few, Van Dyke at Princeton, Sloane at Columbia, Wheeler at the
University of California, Paul Shorey at Chicago, and many others are
men whom not to know and to hear in one's student days is a loss.

The German student is at a distinct advantage in this privilege of hearing
the best men at whatever university they may be. The number of
students, indeed, at particular German universities rises and falls in
a large measure according to the fame and ability of the professors
who may be lecturing there. One can read