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Copyright by the Department of Enlisted Specialists, C. A. S.

THE PROJECTILE TRAVELING AT THE RATE OF 800 MILES AN HOUR

one five-thousandth of a second after it has burst, scientists may discover a way to make steel stronger by remedying unknown defects in the modern hardening and tempering processes.

It is understood that a shell is heated red-hot by the friction of the air and that it is at an even higher temperature when crashing through armor plate. The question of whether a projectile enters the target whirling rapidly cr if it has lost its rotary motion in its flight is also of first importance to the manufacturers of armor plate and of the shells to pierce it.

All these problems and as many more

are perhaps on the verge of solution through the medium of a wonderful camera which operates so rapidly that there is no motion of a tangible object which cannot be recorded on the highly sensitized plates.

The study of these problems has hitherto been based altogether upon theory and upon costly experiments that at best could never be conclusive because the elements in the calculations could be observed only at rest - before the shot was fired and after the shell had struck. Photography has now brought to view at least the beginning and the end of flight of the projectile.

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A MASTER-MISTRESS OF EDUCATION

MISS M. CAREY THOMAS, PRESIDENT OF BRYN MAWR COLLEGE, WHOSE GUIDANCE HAS DEVELOPED ONE OF THE MOST EFFICIENT INSTITUTIONS FOR THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN AND A REMARKABLE SELFGOVERNING DEMOCRACY OF AMERICAN GIRLS

M

BY

SARAH COMSTOCK

ORE than forty years ago a little girl prayed God to remove her from an unjust world if it were really true that girls were so constituted as to be unable to master Greek and go to college and understand things. She had heard that this was true; and, inasmuch as she wanted nothing in the world so much as education, she preferred not to live without it. To-day she is president of one of the most remarkable of women's colleges, a college which is what it is because of what Dr. Horace Howard Furness has called her "master-mistress mind."

President M. Carey Thomas, of Bryn

Mawr College, would probably be the last person on earth to admit the truth of this commendation. Her mind is so busy accomplishing feats that it has no time left in which to admire itself. In fact, she would give you the impression that Bryn Mawr has, by some mysterious process, worked its own way to the position in which it stands to-day, as if she had had nothing to do with blazing the trail.

And yet, if ever an institution reflected the spirit of its leader, this college does. The passion for learning which inspired the little girl's prayers, and has burned at white heat through a half century, and the innate democracy of the woman, are

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the two vital forces which animate the life of this little group of girls among the Pennsylvania hills.

She has brought into existence one of the most perfectly constituted democracies that exists. It is a democracy such as men and nations might afford the time to pause before and examine. It is nothing more or less than a self-government of 430 young women, the sort of wholesome, level-headed, outdoor young women who make up our best type of college girls. They are no less human than girls of all types the world over; temptation in the form of dinner dances in study hours, and May-day idleness when there are examinations to be prepared for, besets the Bryn Mawr girls just as often as it besets young femininity elsewhere; yet they meet it and come off victorious. They sit in judgment upon one another, keeping order in their own halls, sternly refusing one another permission for undue gaieties, suspending one another, even expelling one another, with never an older head to advise. Where rules issued and punishments meted out by faculties fail, the government of these girls by themselves succeeds.

Self-government in colleges, and even in lower schools, is no longer new; but Bryn Mawr College earned the title of pioneer. Before any other had dared this radical form of government, Miss Thomas, then a very young woman and dean of the institution, had urged that this group of

girls be given full power to rule themselves. The thing was tried; it is now almost thirty years old.

Dr. Joseph Taylor, a Quaker gentleman of the old school, was founder of the college and, in early days, its president. In charge of its classrooms he placed a corps of young bachelors, who were to guide the young and charming students along the briery paths of Greek, biology, and calculus. This was the situation which Miss Thomas, then in her twenties, faced in 1885. Hardly more than a girl herself, her task was to look to the conduct of these other girls.

The task did not look easy. Her keen eyes, with a Welsh ancestry behind their keenness, set to work to investigate, and her brain to reflect. Ruling these girls by rigid, boarding-school-missish regulations appeared futile. They were an independent and mentally advanced type, and inclined to rule themselves.

Only a mind of big initiative and daring would have risked the thing which Miss Thomas risked twenty-seven years ago. But it was just that sort of mind. Take a glance back over its accomplishments, and the situation looks clearer.

First, when Martha Carey Thomas was a little girl she had agonized in prayer over what we now call the woman questionat that time hardly vexed enough to be termed a question at all. She had suffered from awful doubts as to whether women

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UNDER WHOSE PRESIDENCY BRYN MAWR COLLEGE HAS BECOME ONE OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS FOR THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

FOREMOST

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were physically and mentally fit for college to be sure, she couldn't find any proof to the contrary, but people said they were unfit. And through all this storm. and stress she had held to the underlying belief that she could go to college and learn what men learn, and the event of her life was her meeting with a college woman a Vassar graduate.

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She drank in this wonderful creature. "She's exactly like other delightful women," was the summing up.

Here, then, was a proof. Woman could do it. To the young girl, born in conservative Baltimore, trained in private schools, this meeting was a great dramatic situation.

She was beginning to shake herself free. She announced that she would go to Cornell University. This was not what a Baltimore young lady usually did, but Miss Thomas bore off a degree in 1877.

Next she spent a year at Johns Hopkins. Next she decided to go to Leipzig for advanced study. Perhaps the going was even less significant than the fact that she did the deciding for herself. In that point lay the real pioneering. After she reached Germany, the first news from home was that family friends were preserving a sort of hush regarding this unconventional daughter in the presence of her mother, and hardly spoke of her, as if she had brought some sort of disgrace upon the family and was to be mentioned barely

A PANORAMIC VIEW OF THE CAMPUS AND

above a whisper. Miss Thomas maintained a firm chin and continued her study. She passed from the University of Leipzig to Göttingen and Zurich.

She was still in her twenties, and yet she could look back over years of achievement and realize that through them all she had been she had been a self-governed, selfresponsible individual. This surely explains why it occurred to her that other girls had a right to rule themselves just as she had done. If she had been by instinct a conformist herself she would have demanded hide-bound rules for others. But if you should see her to-day you would read in one glance the fact that she never was one. There is too high a brow under her white hair to permit her to accept others' explanations until she has probed them with her own mind. There is a determination in the chin that never succumbed merely because it was told to do so. told to do so. And there is too much humor twinkling in her dark eyes to miss the joke that lurks in accepted standards.

And therefore, when higher education for women under any conditions was so new as to be a bit shocking, what did this mind of initiative and daring do but rise up and recommend self-government in a little Quaker college for girls. For, although the institution was undenominational in name, it was strongly Quaker in atmosphere at that time.

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