Opening of the Graduate School.

The reception given by the Faculty for the Graduate School was held last night in the Faculty room in University hall. About two hundred and fifty members of the School were present and and a number of members of the Faculty. Dean Wright presided and after welcoming both the old and the new men, spoke briefly on the function of a university. He said it had three aims--the conservation, the transmission and the advancement of knowledge. The first of these is accomplished by museums, the second by the education of raw material, and the third by the promotion of research. The last of these is the part that an observatory does.

With this as an introduction, Professor E. C. Pickering, the director of the Observatory, was introduced as the first speaker of the evening.

Professor Pickering said that he would speak on the work of the Harvard Observatory, but that first he would discuss a subject of wider interest--namely the qualifications which a scientific man should have who is in charge of some institution. This is the era of consolidation. A man can no longer work by himself, but must work in connection with others. A scientific man, to be qualified to direct consolidated work must not be the kind of a man a professor was at one time supposed to be--entirely above mundane affairs-- he must have a technical knowledge to start with. A man must be able to say he can do something better than anybody else. In the United States we shall enjoy an advantage in science as we already do in commerce, if we take advantage of our opportunities.

What men get in college life, which is of worth, is not wholly in lectures and recitations, but in the contact with educated men and seeing the ways of the world. Thus the old-time idea of a professor apart from the world and above it is outgrown; and such a man would not be the one who could direct consolidated work.

In speaking of the work of the Harvard Observatory in the department of stellar photography, Professor Pickering briefly went over some of the facts in its development. The first photographs that were made of the stars were taken fifty years ago by Professor George R. Bond, with wet plates. Seventeen years ago Professor Pickering began obtaining appropriations for further experiments in the same direction, and successive good results have made the investigations very large. Photographic telescopes have been employed at Arequipa, Peru, and at Cambridge, and in the former place two tons of glass in the form of photographic plates have been used. The tremendous library, as it may be called, which has thus been formed is used to supplement the discoveries made in other observatories. In all this there must of course be much organization.

Dr. F. G. Peabody was the second speaker. He spoke of the help that the Graduate School gives to the Faculty, for there is a sense of vacuum in teaching until the instructor receives the momentum which a serious man of the graduate type gives. The student gives to the University and it gives to him. There is about us all, when members of a university, the sense of a soldiers life. The university is the home of the ideal and, as President Gilman once said, if it does not hold up idealism, it has no reason to exist. Such a condition is necessary to oppose to the materialism of the business world. Thus it is that we get religion here in our midst. But the forced religion of the past which formed a part of the College curriculum was incompatible with truth as the standard of Harvard. University life is the supreme privilege, to take the idea of Spencer, of contemplating the energy from which all things proceed.

The last speaker was P. C. Hoyt 4G., the president of the Graduate Club, who addressed the men on the purposes of the club. He said they were two-fold--that of instruction, and for the advancement of social life. The social life was the point he dwelt on, as this modifies the tendency of the advanced student to stay most of the time by himself.