t at the universities outside
the large towns, and not including the fashionable universities, such
as Bonn or Heidelberg, the student gets on comfortably with fifty
dollars a month. They have their coffee and rolls in the morning,
their midday meal which they take together at a restaurant, and their
supper of cold meats, preserves, cheese, and beer where they will. For
seventy-five cents a day a student can feed himself.

The hours are Aristotelian, for it was Aristotle in his "Economics,"
and not a nursery rhymer, who wrote: "It is likewise well to rise
before daybreak, for this contributes to health, wealth, and wisdom."
"Early to bed and early to rise" is a classic.

At Bonn, a member of one of the three more fashionable corps spends
far more than these sums, and his habits may be less Spartan. The
ridiculous expenditure of some of our mamma-bred undergraduates, who
go to college primarily to cultivate social relations, are unknown
anywhere in Germany, for a student would make himself unpopularly
conspicuous by extravagance. Two to three thousand dollars a year,
even at Bonn, as a member of the best corps, would be amply sufficient
and is considered an extravagant expenditure.

When the Earl of Essex was sent to Cambridge in Queen Elizabeth's
time, he was provided with a deal table covered with baize, a truckle-bed,
half a dozen chairs, and a wash-hand basin. The cost of all this
was about $25. When students from all over Europe tramped to Paris to
hear Abelard lecture, they begged their way. They were given special
licenses as scholars to beg. Learning then, as it is still in Germany,
alone of all the nations, was considered to be a pious profession
deserving well of the world. We do not even know the names of our
scholars in America. How many Americans have heard of Gibbs, the
authority on the fundamental laws regulating the trend of
transformation in chemical and physical processes, or of Hill and his
theory of the moon, or of Hale who explains the mystery of sun spots
and measures the magnetic forces that play around the sun? How many
Frenchmen know Pierron's translation of Aeschylus, or Patin's studies
in Greek tragedies, or Charles Maguin, or Maurice Croiset, or Paul
Magou or Leconte de Lisle? while in England the mass of the people not
only do not know the names of their scholars, but distrust all mental
processes that are super-canine.

The origin of the Landmannschaften, Burschenschaften, and the Corps