It is plastic, constantly subject to change and improvement, adapted to the varying needs of the student body, especially the more mature, and conducive to growth on the part of the faculty, stimulating each member to make the most of his department.

In addition to the above resident courses the College gives correspondence instruction in a fine line of highly practical subjects, including Business and English branches, Newspaper Work, Art, Architecture, Trades, Metallurgy, and Mechanical, Steam, Mining, Civil, and Sanitary Engineering. This is made possible by an arrangement effected with one of the leading correspondence schools of the East.

In the faculty and teaching force are found representatives of Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Oberlin, and German Universities, and some of the best of the smaller colleges. Four of the faculty have served as college presidents, the principal of the normal department having for a dozen years had charge of one of the State normal schools of Missouri. Among the lecturers are Prof. George D. Herron and Prof. Frank Parsons, the latter planning to spend four weeks in May and June in the work of the College as teacher and lecturer.

The College enrolment, beginning last June with almost nothing, has already reached for all departments for this year, and including the summer normal, 300, the States and Territories of California, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Texas, as well as England, being represented. With the new opportunities now developing and the continued assistance of the friends of the movement we may expect several hundred more within the coming year.

An additional evidence of stability is found in the fact that friends of the work are removing to Trenton, enrolling their children as students in the College, investing their money in the college industries and their labor and talent in the work. of class-room, farm, and field. Several of such families have. recently arrived and others have arranged to come. The factory enterprise will prove especially attractive to such.

Cost of living in Trenton is moderate. Parents desiring to educate their children can remove to Trenton, buy or rent a few acres of land and engage in small farming, selling their products to the Trenton-Ruskin factory. Knowledge of this fact will doubtless bring many within the next year.

The reception given the College by the local community is most cordial. The three daily papers of the town have opened their columns to the institution, the funds for the factory have been very largely subscribed by local business men, and encouragement for the work is given on all sides.

But education to be effective must be available. The higher culture must be democratized: it must be brought within the reach of the poorest. Ruskin College can already do much for the poor boy, but it would do far more. It would open its doors to him though he come without one cent. How may this be made possible? By means of a Loan Fund, from which an advance of $100 or $125 can be made to the student on entrance. This he may repay after graduation from his increased earnings. This fund the College is working for.

What can the friends of the College throughout the country do for it? They can inform themselves more fully as to the status and work, and can then inform their friends and especially the youth of their acquaintance who desire, at small cost, a well-rounded, practical education free from monopoly influences. They can, in cases, remove to Trenton and aid with suggestion, funds, and labor in building up the institution and its interests. They can raise the Students' Loan Fund and can contribute directly to the College treasury.

If education in America is to be maintained by the Rockefellers and Stanfords, rest assured it will be controlled by them. If controlled by wealth, the influences of our colleges will favor the maintenance of triumphant plutocracy. If the people are not willing that those who control their industries, their fortunes, and their lives shall also control their thinking and thus control permanently their national policies, it is needful that from their own small earnings and savings they shall furnish the means that will make at least one institution in

America independent of the millionaire who to-day controls so largely both private and public colleges and universitiesthe one through the bludgeon of the endowment, granted or withheld, and the other through the might of the party "boss." THOMAS ELMER WILL.

Ruskin College, Trenton, Mo.

I

GEOLOGY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

Nits most modern aspects, earth-study has shifted its main view-point from the product to the process. This step alone immeasurably separates the new from the old. By recognizing the genetic principle, geography, geology, and astronomy have become sciences that are new in every sense of the word.

Advancement in earth-study has been greater during the century just passed than in all previous time. It has been more rapid in the last twenty years than in the hundred preceding. A century of active, fruitful, and systematic effort has not only produced unparalleled progress, but has introduced into geological science a multitude of ideas entirely novel. Many of these are bound to have a lasting influence upon scientific thought. Some of them bid fair to be handed down through the ages as the most brilliant conceptions of a copiously productive period. To geology, they are the great landmarks of the nineteenth century. A half score of them stand out prominently.

The determination in the rocks of a measure of time has given to earth-study much of its widespread interest. Before this discovery, geology as a science was impossible. It never could have risen above a monotonous description of minerals. Now it is thoroughly philosophic. It treats of cause and effect, of process and product, of events and their sequence. A history is read that is as fascinating and full of action as human history, with chapters ever new and ever thrilling.

The establishment of a geological time-scale was truly epoch-making. From this time dates the rise of modern geology. Up to the close of the eighteenth century, the conception had only been faintly outlined by the contemporaries of the great Werner and Hutton. In England, William Smith had already discovered the key for recognizing certain strata by the fossils that they contained. But

it remained for the master mind of Lyell, a quarter of a century later, to develop the idea into an actual working scheme of geological chronology. Henceforward, so allabsorbing became the study of the ancient organic remains, as a means of paralleling rock strata in all parts of the globe, that for fifty years all other branches of geology seemed in comparison almost to be at a standstill.

The newly established time-scale in geology stretched out the age of our earth enormously beyond the generally assigned Biblical period. From 6,000 years, the geologist's best estimates were for more than 25,000,000 years for the stratified rocks alone. At once the geologists had the theologians arrayed bitterly against them. As in so many cases when science has come into apparent conflict with religion, the scientists went quietly along with their work of searching after truth only-and won. Now there are no longer hostile camps; and many an eminent divine has become an ardent student of Nature.

The proving that there existed in late geological times a vast polar ice-cap, reaching down in this country to the latitude of Cincinnati and St. Louis, may be considered as one of the grand triumphs of science. Until a generation ago, scientists had no idea that an arctic climate had prevailed so recently over the northern hemisphere. It was a veritable Ice Age; and "its conception is one of the scientific novelties of which," says a recent writer, "our century may boast and which no previous century has even so much as faintly adumbrated."

The difficulties that beset the investigation of former glacial action are somewhat appalling. McGee most clearly depicts the conditions when he states that "the trail of the ice monster has been traced, his magnitude measured, and his form and even his features figured forth-and all from the slime of his body alone, when even his characteristic tracks fail." But the geologists have overcome all obstacles and made the glacial theory one of the firmest tenets of science.