from five to a dozen men strive earnestly to win this prize, and each year those men spend time carefully revising their studies, or taking up new ones, or working on problems which will help them to be ready. The value of such preparation to the unsuccessful aspirants is no small factor in the development of the architectural sense of the community. Thirty-four men have won the scholarship. Something like 150 more have seriously tried for it, and probably 200 others have followed serious preparatory studies without entering the competition. The Boston Architectural Club has of late years constituted itself a special training department for the scholarship, and the good the club has accomplished is immeasurably greater because of the fact of this prize which offers itself to the young men. Nor is this all. The bringing together of the best minds in the architectural profession in the judgment
of these problems is of value not easily estimated, but which is unquestioned. Nor is the good which accrues to the profession limited to Boston or Massachusetts. Out of twenty-nine living prize men who returned from abroad, twelve are permanently located in Boston, nine in New York, one in Chicago, two in San Francisco, one in Alabama, two in Michigan, two in Missouri, and in every case these men have taken a prominent part in the architectural development of the country and have been associated with the best impulses, so that while the
scholarship is a local institution, it has sent out influences through the whole country and has proven itself of national value.
And yet further has the influence of the scholarship extended. In 1883 there were no scholarships. To-day there are a score or more. Nearly every university where architecture is successfully taught has one or more, and there are independent scholarships like the American Academy prize. All of these have followed more or less directly in the lines of the Rotch Scholarship, though the Rotch remains individual in one respect, in that it is one of the very
PEN AND INK SKETCH BY FREDERICK ROY WITTON