practices.  The year 1870-1871 was perhaps too good to be repeated.  The next year witnessed at least one discouraging exhibition of student-manners, and since then there have been explosions from time to time.  For all that, the general tone at Cornell is excellent.  The transitory disturbances seem to leave behind them no abiding ill-will, and there is certainly less friction between faculty and students than at any like institution.  Nowhere in this country is college life more free from petty annoyance, dislike and mistrust, and hereditary prejudices.  It should be added, that those students who now reside in the university buildings belong almost exclusively to what is known as the working corps.  They are type-setters in the printing-office, or are engaged upon the university farm, or in the workshops connected with the department of the mechanic arts.  Their time is too valuable to them to be wasted.  The experience of the Sheffield Scientific School resembles that of Cornell.  In one respect it is even better.  This school has never had a dormitory system.  Its managers, imbued thoroughly with the German and French spirit of study, have resisted successfully from the outset every inducement to follow the usual college system.  Although growing up in the shadow of one of the oldest colleges in the country, and exposed to formidable competition, and still more formidable criticism, the Sheffield Scientific has adhered strictly to its self-appointed mission.  It has regarded instruction in science as its sole object.  Whatever tended to this object has been adopted:  everything else has been rejected as irrelevant.  We are not concerned in this place with the general reputation of the Sheffield Scientific at home and abroad.  Singling out only one of its many merits, we can point to it with pride as the first institution to solve effectually the knotty problem of discipline.  The means of its success are anything but occult.  It has made its pupils feel from the moment of entrance that they were young men, and must act as such.  It has refused to encumber itself with expensive and useless dormitories, and the faculty has in the main left the students to themselves.  But whenever interference became necessary, it has acted promptly, without undue haste or severity, and also without vacillation.  Here, at least, we do not find the ruinous practice of suspending a student one week, only to take him back the next.  The mere existence, then, of the Sheffield Scientific—­to say nothing of its success—­by the side of the powerful corporation of Yale College is fatal to every argument in favor of the dormitory system.