The following extract is taken from a comment in the Science Monthly on a conversation between two learned European scholars. Professor Struve said that "this conclusion had been drawn independently by so many differently circumstanced men in the Russian and German-Baltic provinces, from the general impressions which their recollections gave them, that there could be little doubt of its containing much truth-truth, too, of a startling character: the first boys at school disappear at the colleges, and those who are first in the colleges disappear in the world. I am not sure that a similar conclusion would not follow from a similar investigation into our own, as well as into English and German academical history, and that it would not be found that the men most useful and successful in after-life were not those who had placed themselves most fully under the influence of college training, or been stimulated to exertion by mere hope of college rewards, but those who had been most successful in escaping its narrowing influences while on the other hand, they had also escaped the still greater dangers of idleness and dissipation in the formative period of their history-men who had cast from them the trammels of pedantry, and with independent energy marked out their own career."