affording every facility for study; but would not Munich, or Leipzig, or
Jena, or any other one of the twenty-six universities of Germany, better
answer the purpose of many a student?

During the last winter, in many conversations with a retired professor
in Berlin, who manifested a special interest in American institutions,
mainly in the American educational system, he was very particular in
inquiring as to what we meant by our term _College_. He had read the
work of the historian Raumer on America, and declared that from this he
could get no notion whatever as to what the term meant with us. The very
same thing occurs daily in the United States in regard to foreign, or,
more properly, the Continental universities. Accustomed as we are to the
prevalence of the tutorial system, the use of text-books,--in many parts
of the Union not defining clearly the difference between the terms
University, College, Institute, and Academy, giving the first name often
to institutions having but one faculty, and that at times incomplete,
with no theological, and often no law or medical department, forgetting
that the University should, from its very name, be as universal as
possible in its teachings, comprehending in its list of studies the
combined scientific and literary pursuits of the age,--we are apt to
look upon foreign schools of learning as similar in nature and purpose
to our own, differing not in the quality or specific character of the
teaching, but rather in the scope and extent of the branches taught. Yet
nothing is farther from the truth. The result is, that many a one starts
for Europe full of hope, to seek what he would have found better at
home,--or, when prepared and mature for European travel, is left to
chance or one-sided advice in the choice of a locality in which to
prosecute further studies. Often with only book-knowledge of the
language of the country, accident will lead him to the very university
the least adequate to his purpose.