I AM GLAD to know Cornell University is to I establish a department of journalism next September. I have always claimed that journalism could be taught in universities and colleges just as successfully as any other athletic exercise. Of course you cannot teach a boy how to jerk a giant journal from the clutches of decay and make of it a robust and rip snorting shaper and trimmer of public opinion, in whose counting-room people will walk all over each other in their mad efforts to insert advertisements. You cannot teach this in a school any more than you can teach a boy how to discover the open Polar Sea, but you can teach him the rudiments and save him a good deal of time experimenting with himself.

Boys spend small fortunes and the best years of their lives learning the simplest truths in relation to journalism. We grope on blindly, learning this year perhaps how to distinguish an italic shooting-stick when we see it, or how to eradicate type lice from a standing galley, learning next year how to sustain life on an annual pass and a sample early-rose potato weighing four pounds and measuring eleven inches in circumference. This is a slow and tedious way to obtain journalistic training. If this can be avoided or abbreviated it will be a great boon.

As I understand it, the department in Cornell University will not deal so much with actual newspaper experience as it will with construction and style in writing. This is certainly a good move, for we must admit that we can improve very greatly our style and the purity of our English. For instance, I select an exchange at random, and on the telegraphic page I find the details of a horrible crime. It seems that an old lady, who lived by herself almost, and who had amassed between $16 and $17, was awakened by an assassin, dragged from her bed and cruelly murdered. The large telegraph headline reads: "Drug from her bed and murdered!" This is incorrect in orthography, syntax and prosody, bad in form and inelegant in style. Carefully parsing the word drug as it appears here, I find that it does not agree with anything in number, gender or person. I do not like to criticise the style of others when I know that my own is so faulty, but I am sure that the word drug should not be used in this way.

Take the following, also, from the Kansas correspondence of the Statesville (N.C.) Landmark:

"There were several bad accidents in and around Clear Water during my absence from home. The saddest one was the shooting of one Peter Peterson by his father. They were out rabbit-hunting in the snow. A rabbit got up and started to run. The son was in a swag of a place and the father was taking aim at the rabbit. The son at the same time was trying to get a shot at it and, not knowing that his father was shooting, ran between the rabbit and his father and was killed dead, falling on the snow with his gun grasped in his hands and never moved. He still carried that pleasant smile which he had on, in expectation of shooting that jack rabbit, when put in the grave. Wheat is selling at about 60 cents; corn, 40 to 50 cents; fat hogs, gross, 44 to 41; fat steers, 41; butcher's stock, 2 cents."

It is hard to say just exactly wherein this is faulty, but something is the matter with it. I would like to get an expression of opinion from those who take an interest in such things, as to whether the fault is in orthoepy, orthography, anatomy, obituary or price current, or whether it consists in writing several features too closely in the same paragraph.

It would also be a good idea to establish a chair for advertisers in some practical college, in order that they might run in for a few hours and learn how to write an advertisement so that it would express in the most direct way what they desired to state. Here is an advertisement, for instance, which is given exactly as written and punctuated:

Mrs. Dr. Edwards,