The selections here placed together under the head, "The University Group," are taken from the works of authors who have taught or who are now teaching in the University of Wisconsin, and who may, therefore, be said both to have influenced it in its ideals and to have been influenced by it. The work of the editors in this section of the volume has been at once peculiarly pleasant and difficult. It has been pleasant because, under the shadow of Wisconsin's greatest institution of learning, there has come into birth a large body of interesting, instructive, and thoroughly worth-while literary material. The task has been difficult because the line between technical and special material treated in a literary way, and what may be styled pure literature, is very hard to draw. The editors realize thoroughly their fallibility in the making of these selections. So many books have been written, and so many contributions to both popular and technical magazines have been made by teachers in the University, that it is a physical impossibility even to scan them with any sure result of fairness or equity in the selection of real literature from the great mass that has been produced. The most that is claimed for the present selections is that at least they are thoroughly worth-while. No doubt a search covering sufficient time and dealing with a sufficiently large portion of the output of the University would reveal other works and other men worthy of representation in this volume.

There is another consideration that should be mentioned as rendering the task of the present editors peculiarly difficult: All but one of the men whose works are mentioned here are now living. Aside from the impossibility of wholly pleasing any man by a selection from or a criticism of his work, there is the inevitable fact that since most of these men are young, their actual relative standing as producers of literature is constantly and rapidly changing. As one reads the selections in the following pages, he is impressed most of all by the spirit of buoyancy and youth that pervades them. Scarcely a single selection here, even those by the older men, bears the imprint of satiety or completion. All are pulsing with life, hopefulness, buoyancy, and promise.

Again, in a book of this nature, selections must necessarily be brief. It is not possible to give really adequate representation to any one of these men, since the laws of space are inexorable.

Perhaps the one thing common to all sections in this group—the thing which will most readily and profoundly impress even the youngest reader—is a feeling of breadth of experience, wide observation, earnest, keen, and insatiable desire for truth,—in fact, all the opposites of narrowness, prejudice, provincialism. One feels at once that the writers here have read widely and well, that they have a fund of facts gained both from books and at first hand through travel and observation, and that their emotions and their judgments spring from this well of truth as they see it.