for university entrance. If a prospective student has passed 45 suitable units but is recommended only in 42, he cannot enter the University without passing an examination in the unrecommended units. A considerable number of students graduate from high schools of California who are unable to enter the University for lack of this recommendation from the high school. A diploma from a high school and a recommendation to the University are two quite different things. Attention has been called to the fact that of the 170 entrants to the University Farm School last year, 86 were high school graduates. For the reasons just explained, it does not follow that any or all could enter the degree courses at Berkeley. The principal point to be brought out is, that on account of the University Farm School at Davis, it is not necessary to let down the bars for students entering the courses in agriculture at Berkeley. We merely say to the student or his parents, that the University Farm School is open to him if he is unable to offer our requirements for admission, provided he is eighteen years of age. On the other hand if a student fails in the degree courses in Berkeley, he is not permitted to enter at Davis. There are always a certain number of students, especially in other courses in the University, who, for lack of any earnest purpose, suddenly find that they have a deep longing for the soil and are quite sure that the University Farm School is the place that just fits their needs. These cases often sound quite pathetic, but they never get by for reasons that are well understood by administrative officers.

In the College of Agriculture the freshman and sophomore years must be taken at Berkeley. Before entering on their junior year, each student is required to have completed the following four technical subjects; agricultural chemistry, soils, plant propagation and the principles of breeding plants and animals. These courses have certain prerequisites, such as botany, chemistry, bacteriology, geology and zoology. Therefore, no student can enter the

junior year without having received a thorough foundation in the pure sciences and a comprehensive knowledge of the fundamentals of agriculture. It may be added that each of the four technical subjects below the junior year are taught by full professors. These four professors are told that it is a matter of indifference what else they may do so long as they give themselves body and soul to these beginning courses. When I observe that all four of these professors come through their semester's work each year almost physical wrecks, I feel sure that the students are getting the last ounce that is coming to them.

Between the sophomore and the junior years each student is required to take a summer practice course along the lines in which he expects to major. The methods of conducting these summer practice courses are as varied as the major subjects themselves, but all are intended to give the students some practical insight into his major subject before he enters upon its more theoretical study. It is believed to give him a better appreciation of his subjects of study and to give him an opportunity to back up and start over if he finds himself out of accord with the subject in which he intended to major. Each student is required to have a reading knowledge of some foreign language. When a student becomes a junior he is required to take a major subject. Only fourteen units out of sixty are required, however, so that theoretically a student may take any subject he wishes within certain rather wide limits during his junior and senior years. In practice, however, every junior and senior is under the supervision of his major professor. He cannot get his class card accepted until it has been approved by him. Ordinarily if a student is majoring in a certain subject he has a high regard for his major professor or he would be majoring in some other subject. Even if he did not, he knows that if he does not take subjects that are satisfactory to the major professor he cannot expect his professor to endorse him after he graduates. The character of the courses taken, therefore, depends largely upon the breadth or lack of

breadth of the major professor and upon his persuasive powers. In other words, a student entering the University must make two choices: first, he must choose the college he will enter; second, in two years he must choose the subject within that college in which he will major. For the rest his choices are made for him, and yet it may be doubted whether any two students in the College of Agriculture ever take exactly the same course. In certain majors all the work of the junior and senior years is done at Berkeley. In certain majors it is optional whether it is all taken at Berkeley, or in part at Davis. In other majors at least one semester is required at Davis; in others, two are required there. Out of 250 juniors and seniors now in the College of Agriculture, about 75 were at Davis last semester.

The requirements of the subject assigned to me, that is, "Methods of Procedure," has made it necessary to give you only the bones of the organization of the College of Agriculture. The flesh that we are trying to put on the skeleton I would not have time to develop, even had I your permission to do so.

I can never prepare a paper concerning the College of Agriculture of the University, however, without in some form or other calling attention to Dr. Carver's dictum : "That if you admit that life is worth living, then you must admit that the highest function of man is not the promotion of science or literature or art, but it is the rearing of a successful family." This statement is of peculiar significance to every college of agriculture and this College of Agriculture has swallowed it, bait, hook, line and sinker. The primary purpose of the College of Agriculture is not to enable the farmer to exchange his Ford for a Packard, although we are delighted to be of service in that direction, or to educate a man merely that he may make a worldly success, although we intend to do everything in our power to make this possible; but our chief purpose is to create successful homes in the open country.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SPANISH

ADVENTURER

S. GRISWOLD MORLEY

Standing in the midst of a tide of collectivism such as the world has never before seen, most of us still feel a warm thrill of pleasure when we read of some foot-loose, redblooded human animal whose energy was equalled only by his social freedom. The blond beast in our town is a wretched neighbor, but let him be transplanted to a distant century and clime, and we experience a clandestine admiration for his spirit and his works that bears no relation to our twentieth century standard of private behavior. Today only nations as a whole dare to be thoroughly mean, and they are slowly nearing the point of circumspection. So it is when we wish to stir the Adam in our blood by the contemplation of some splendid explosion of human force, we turn to Cortés, Cellini, or even Casanova. The unsought alliteration seems to suggest that the letter C may be the natural initial of an adventurous spirit crossed with an itch for publicity.

I cite as witness Alonso de Contreras, whose autobiography has been unearthed and published, after reposing nearly four centuries under the dust of a Madrid library. Contreras was a professional fighter on land and sea, who rose from nothing to be a Commander of the Knights of Malta, no slight achievement in itself. Not one of the shrewd climbers, he never thought large and never reached

high diplomatic posts. He looked but a short distance in advance; he was an insubordinate swashbuckler, a dreadnought captain, afraid neither of man nor devil, yet with a code of honor of his own, and a dash of piety that would cause wonder were it not so common in that age. He arrived too late to form one of the band of conquistadores, but their spirit ran in his blood entire. Of such men were the armies of Spain in her great days, and such a type explains many victories. His life-story, told with the utmost frankness, is to a degree a mirror of the time. More completely, it is a mirror of a soldier's life in the continual wars of the Renaissance; and that a soldier in those days missed little of experience, be you the judge.

I

Our hero was born in 1582. By pure chance his official name was Contreras, for that was his mother's name, which he adopted when he first joined the army. Afterward he wished to take back the surname of his father, but it was then too late, for his service papers were made out to Contreras. Before he left his home in Madrid he had killed a school-mate with the knife of his writing-kit and spent a year in exile for the crime. Only his youth saved him from death-the first of many narrow escapes. He was not yet fourteen, and had this past behind him, when he shook off his mother's restraining hand, his father being dead, and set out after the trumpets of the cardinalprince Albert archduke of Austria. He was only a campfollower, a hanger-on watching for scraps, but on the first day he gambled away his last real and every rag of clothes upon his body: "which clearly showed that I was to be a soldier." In fact he contrived to pry open a place as cook's boy, and was soon allowed to serve the king, though under age.

With that began vicissitudes as varied as those of Ulysses, and some were staged in the same scenes. The Grecian archipelago was the region in which the young