be instantly divided into five separate parts by iron doors connected with eight fire-proof walls. The latter are in pairs, standing ten feet apart, and cut the building into five divisions. These pairs of walls are connected only at the corridors, where the floor is brick and stone, over which the iron doors may slide and be closed, so that, should a conflagration occur in one portion of the building, the other parts would be perfectly secure from harm. These divisions of iron and masonry extend from the foundation to the roof."

Vassar is located about two miles east of the city of Poughkeepsie, New York, and it embraces in its immense building all the rooms necessary for the board and tuition of some four hundred students and their teachers. It will not be seen without some reflection what these words imply. The college authorities thus become not only the instructors, but the heads of the family of four hundred, and the immense complication of duties which this arrangement presents it is not easy to appreciate. We have at once before us a large hotel, with all the departments necessarily involved in that, and we must not put out of view the evident fact that, as this hotel is not in a city, it will be forced to provide its own supplies of water and gas, and to carry on its own laundry. We have next to include all that we expect to find in every college, with its full number of departments, adding to the number of professors requisite a resident physician, with hospital accommodations for the sick. We must not forget a treasurer's department, which includes, from the suburban situation of the college, post-office, express office, and telegraph-and we see at once that the positions of president and lady principal are situations demanding the very highest qualifications.

I do not mean that the direct supervision of all these departments comes upon the president and lady principal, but I do mean that, living in the midst of the community as they do, with so many different departments, the greatest executive skill is demanded in order that there be no waste of time from the clashing of one against the other, and in order that the intellectual work, which is the object of all this machinery, may go smoothly on. The college work proper is, of course, to Vassar what the brain is to the other organs of the human body. For that alone they all exist, and they must be all controlled for its convenience. But as in endeavoring to understand the human body we can not neglect the organs of repair, of nutrition, nor even the mechanical structure, so, minor though they be, we can not pass without notice the corresponding departments of Vassar College.

MATTHEW VASSAR, JUN.

We have, then, first, the outside department of the farm and garden; next, a department not generally reckoned as one, however-that of guide and messenger. This needs some explanation.

In the room of this officer is the clock in accordance with which, and by means of wires connected with a powerful battery in the chemical laboratory, all the regular hours are struck all over. the house with the precision and regularity of the bells of a man-of-war at sea. These bells call the time for rising, meals, the beginning and close of each recitation, and so forth, through the day. In this office, also, are stationed the messenger girls, who, as their name indicates, are employed to convey messages from teacher to teacher or from teacher to pupil. Mechanical though this so-called department may be, it will be at once perceived that it is very important.

The janitor's department has the care of all ordinary repairs and of the porterage, which, it is readily seen, is one requiring considerable skill at the beginning and end of terms.

Next comes the treasurer's department, which transacts all financial business, and whose office includes the post-office, express office, and telegraph, also a bookstore on a small scale for the supply of text-books and all needful school apparatus. To the judicious management of Matthew Vassar, Jun., the treasurer, and nephew of the founder, the college is largely indebted for its flourishing financial condition.

Fourth in order is the engineer's department, the duties of which are to furnish plenty of heat, light, and water to the small village. But in order to guard against all possible casualties from fire, this depart

ment, isolated like the sun from the earth, is placed at quite a distance from the college building. If, guided by the tall chimney, we make our way thither, we find an immense coal-yard, five large boilers, a complete apparatus for manufacturing gas, and steam-pumps for forcing water. A staff of six men, constantly employed, supply daily to the college building 11,500 feet of gas and 80,000 gallons of water, which numbers are of value only as aiding one to gain a vivid idea of the size of the college.

Through nearly fifty miles of pipe the steam traverses the distance to the main building and warms the whole, partly by means of coils in the rooms, partly by means of coils inclosed in brick chambers in the cellar communicating with hot-air flues. To show what the capacity of the steam apparatus is, it is only necessary to read the description of the size of the building, and to add that even in the coldest of winters there was but little complaint of insufficient heat. Fifth, we name the matron's department, more properly that of the housekeeper, as her duties correspond exactly with those of the housekeeper in any well-regulated hotel. In her charge are all the rooms of the students and the college rooms, and she has under her orders a large corps of servants.

The sixth department, that of steward, includes the purchasing of all supplies, and the management in full of the dining-hall, kitchen, bakery, and laundry. Simply adding, for the same reason as before, the fact that fifty pounds of butter and three hundred quarts of milk are daily in demand, one can easily see that the office of steward at Vassar is no sinecure. The combining

of the laundry with the steward's office seems to be a measure of economy, as part of the servants thus can do double duty; but this arrangement does not prevent the necessity of a competent head for the laundry, which is now in a separate building.

Before we can come to the brain-work we must add still one more department, which might be called the pathological, for although the resident physician is professor in the college as well, yet her direct responsibility for the health of the students and her care of them in sickness do not properly belong to the intellectual side.

The office of this department is not only the consulting-room of the physician, but it includes the hospital proper and several rooms in the upper story, out of the way and of the sound of the otherwise omnipresent electrical bells, in which students who are not really sick, but who are tired, may be quite secluded during whatever time is desirable. It is an undoubted fact that the nervous strain produced simply by living in so large a family, and the constant and necessary demand for exact punctuality that is made on every student by the inexorable bells, are more wearing than any one not living in it can imagine. We all know that there is something in the very atmosphere of a large city which forbids quiet. With the best resolutions in the world as to refraining from overwork, we are, as it were, sucked in by the maelstrom, and our will seems powerless to extricate us. The very sight of Broadway, when one is weary of work, is almost unendurable, and though we are conscious of this sympathetic strain on the nerves only when our own are over

of the divisions and subdivisions, these will not be to her mere names, but she finds the illustrations of the otherwise dry text all laid out before her in order. It is as if one took at a comprehensive glance a survey of all the animal life on the face of the earth. The same educational arrangement is seen in the minerals; and I mention it not for its own sake, or for the sake of the individual mind which actually did the work, but because, reverting to the idea expressed in the beginning of this article, it is as good an illustration as I can give of the spirit of earnest, honest work and adaptation of means to ends-those ends being real education-which the impartial observer can not fail to recognize in every department at Vassar College, and which is an inheritance by right from the earnest, honest spirit of the founder.

But as we turn to leave the building by a long passageway, what noise is this we hear? At first one might fancy that he was in some large lunatic asylum; for a confused medley of sounds, high and low, and of metallic vibrations, recalls to our mind the terrible prophecies of our well-meaning friends. We begin to fear that the overwork at Vassar, too severe for the organization of woman, whose brain was originally

intended only as a servant and not as a master of the other functions of the body, has produced here the expected result. If all American women are to become incipient lunatics as the result of their mental training, would it not have been better for Matthew Vassar to have given his half million to Harvard University, where no such evil could result, and to have dismissed forever his chimerical idea, benevolent, no doubt, but foolish after all?

These doors conduct, doubtless, to so many cells, where the unfortunate victims of "identical education" are confined, and they are placed here so that their shrieks and groans and discordant pounding shall not disturb the remainder of the doomed community. Alas for the rarity of wise generalization from insufficient facts! The thirty doors, when examined, prove only entrances to thirty rooms where thirty stu dents are practicing at thirty different pianos in all styles of art. As we look in, the work still goes on, and healthy faces and erect forms do not even turn to note our coming. We return, simply meditating, as we emerge into a charming little lectureroom, on the uselessness of this hallway experience for moral illustrative purposes. Here, instead of discords blending into har