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Don't Think C. H. Ward The Taft School Watertown, Conn. DR. OSLER once gave a graduating class of medical students at Johns Hopkins Jniversity this priceless counsel: Don't think." If he had never lone any other service to his pro- ession, he would have deserved :nighthood for that advice. Of :ourse he was a good deal of a hinker himself, and of course his [ictum is no more a whole truth han his remark about chloroform- ng after middle age. But his mean- ng, unmistakable to the audience, the slogan most needed in the Eorld today—namely, "Don't sup- Dse that mere thinking will im- -ove mankind; observe and build Upon facts." "Don't think" is specially useful in school, for young people so fre- quently "thought you said" what you did not say, and "thought it was all right'' to do the wrong thing. We older people are even more likely than the young to "think" that a novelty is necessarily wrong and that the old familiar way is bound to be divinely right. We have always been interested in thinking that the sun goes around the earth, that malaria is caused by damp air, that social ills originate in some failure to pass a little law. For a long while we teachers— at least I can speak for myself— thought that moving pictures were vulgar trash to be frowned on; in our conventions we passionately orated and resolved. Nowadays some of us may hope that the movie screen is a magical blessing which will smooth out most of the rough road of pedagogy. Osier, thou shouldst be speaking at this hour to tell us, "Don't think. Find out the facts." Perhaps Dr. Frank N. Freeman, of the University of Chicago, is go- ing to help us to remember the command. On May 27 the Associ- ated Press announced that a sum of ten thousand dollars had been appropriated for his use in an ef- fort to verify or disprove his pres- ent opinion that "the film has a de- finite field and is excellently adapted to certain things." For what sub- jects? To what extent? How? Our prayers are offered that Dr. Freeman may have an eye single to the facts and may on no account be guilty of any mere thinking. The whole history of modern knowledge is a series of revelations of how facts are wildly different from what any imagination could have conceived: explosions of gaso- line can be harnessed in a rhythm; 217