Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1886 [PAGE 147]

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139 tion in Pharmacy. With slight exceptions, easily provided for, all the instruction of a full School of Pharmacy might be given here. Our courses of chemistry and botany are already more complete than in most Colleges of Pharmacy. The great obstacle now exists in the demand of the State Board of Pharmacy for four years of active practice in a drug store, in which it is understood that the time spent in selling over the counter perfumes, spirituous liquors, soda-water and cigars counts equally with that employed in rolling pills or compounding tinctures. It would seem that a course of thorough training in a quantitative laboratory, in weighing, analysis, synthesis, valuing drugs, determining poisons, etc., ought to receive tetter recognition as a part of a druggist's training than is now given to it, and that it is really of more fundamental importance in making a druggist careful, intelligent and exact, than the chief part of what he actually does when professedly serving a drug-shop apprenticeship. We believe it would not be unreasonable to ask that at least one-half the time spent at the University in the pursuit of a course of pharmaceutical instruction should be counted towards the time of drug-shop practice required of the student. We believe that thi V concession could be made without lowering in the least the high standard of qualification which every citizen recognizes as needful in those who dispense to us in prescriptions the things which lay hold of life and death to us and to our families. The COLLEGE OF LITERATURE AND SCIENCE is now that which needs the most earnest fostering care. For six years at least, and, indeed, from the organization of the University, the other colleges liave been earnestly cherished, while this has been permitted to live. Other schools have been provided with lands and laboratories, museums and workshops, apparatus and machinery, while this has had nothing but the patient labor of some earnest workers, and ft small proportion of the books bought for the library. In spite of all assertions to the contrary, it has been literally true that at this University the ''leading object has been to teach those subjects which relate to Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts." Science has been the Isaac and Literature has been the Ishmael of this household. Nor is it now proposed to take away any of Isaac's property to give to Ishmael. Science must ever continue to have the leading place, but Literature and literary students deserve and ought to receive better opportunities than have hitherto been vouchsafed to them. Particular care ought to be given to furnish the best facilities to such as seek the University because of its peculiar training in scientific subjects as a foundation for teaching. In this respect its field and scope are so different from those of the Normal Schools —invaluable as they are in the school system of the State—that there is and can be no unfriendly competition between the two, the University and the Normal Schools, and no attempt on the part of the one to supplant the other. The resolution of the State Association of Teachers, asking for the appointment of a Professor of Pedagogy, was received very cordially by the Board of Trustees of the University. No appointment has yet been made, for the very sufficient reason that the Trustees have as yet no funds which could be used for paying the salary of such an instructor. The subject,