wn their pupils
has been dominated by habits of industry and thrift, so long the
reminiscences of the medicine-man have found but a scant and precarious
acceptance in the scheme of college life. But so soon as wealth begins
appreciably to accumulate in the community, and so soon as a given
school begins to lean on a leisure-class constituency, there comes
also a perceptibly increased insistence on scholastic ritual and on
conformity to the ancient forms as regards vestments and social and
scholastic solemnities. So, for instance, there has been an approximate
coincidence between the growth of wealth among the constituency
which supports any given college of the Middle West and the date of
acceptance--first into tolerance and then into imperative vogue--of
evening dress for men and of the decollete for women, as the scholarly
vestments proper to occasions of learned solemnity or to the seasons
of social amenity within the college circle. Apart from the mechanical
difficulty of so large a task, it would scarcely be a difficult matter
to trace this correlation. The like is true of the vogue of the cap and
gown.

Cap and gown have been adopted as learned insignia by many colleges of
this section within the last few years; and it is safe to say that this
could scarcely have occurred at a much earlier date, or until there had
grown up a leisure-class sentiment of sufficient volume in the community
to support a strong movement of reversion towards an archaic view as to
the legitimate end of education. This particular item of learned ritual,
it may be noted, would not only commend itself to the leisure-class
sense of the fitness of things, as appealing to the archaic propensity
for spectacular effect and the predilection for antique symbolism;
but it at the same time fits into the leisure-class scheme of life as
involving a notable element of conspicuous waste. The precise date at
which the reversion to cap and gown took place, as well as the fact that
it affected so large a number of schools at about the same time,
seems to have been due in some measure to a wave of atavistic sense
of conformity and reputability that passed over the community at that
period.

It may not be entirely beside the point to note that in point of time
this curious reversion seems to coincide with the culmination of a
certain vogue of atavistic sentiment and tradition in other directions
also. The wave of reversion seems to have received its initial