An instructive paper on the " Needs of the University
of Oxford" appears in Tuesday's Times. So far from the Uni- versity profiting from the Rhodes Scholarships, it is worse off than before. Not a penny has been added to the University exchequer, while the number of undergraduates will be in- creased by one-seventeenth, and every additional student involves an extra strain upon the academical finances. The " Oxford Resident " who contributes the paper accordingly summarises the chief needs of the University, as elicited by the circular letter issued last February by the Vice-Chancellor. Of these the most conspicuous are (1) further endowment of the Bodleian to provide for more storage room, better accommodation for readers, increase of staff, and the purchase of foreign works on philosophy, political economy, and modern history ; (2) further provision for the endowment and equipment of the various chairs of physical science. Thus there is no equipment for the study of metallurgy ; no mechanical laboratory ; no engineering department ; while the Wykeham Professor of Physics " lectures in a tin shed with hardly any apparatus on a scanty income." Suggestions for new chairs and readerships in Assyrian, Rabbinical Hebrew, and Pali are also made, but here there is no urgency. On the other hand, the pressure on space in the Bodleian and the laboratories makes the housing question acute. The writer concludes with the sensible suggestion that intending benefactors should cease founding scholarships and devote their liberality to the improvement of the University itself as a teaching institution.
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