IT IS A common practice among educational ad ministrators and scholars to speak of the natural sciences, and humanities as the major categories of scholarship. Sometimes the division between sciences and sciences is made, and in some cases there is doubt concerning the classification of a particular field such as history, which at times is grouped with the humanities and at other with the social sci ences. It is an administrative fact, however, that the fields of scholarly inquiry are commonly clas sified according to such a scheme with divisional organization and deans assigned accordingly. It is the purpose of the present article to present some empirical data from which the major groupings of scholarly fields may be derived in order to deter mine the soundness of the present a priori mode of classification. The data upon which this study rests are derived from Doctorate Production in United States Univer sitiesT936-1956, National Academy of Sciences (1). The authors of this publication have presented a list of the 30 institutions in the nation granting the greatest number of doctor's degrees during the period specified. For each institution, the number of such persons in different fields of learning is given. Our first step consisted of reducing to per centages the numbers in particular disciplines as a proportion of the total doctor's degrees granted by each institution. We took the liberty of elimi nating from consideration certain disciplines such as religion, speech, business administration, and jurisprudence, since these tend to be specialized degrees concentrated in a relatively small number of our 30 graduate institutions. Thus, for each of our 30 largest graduate schools we obtained the percentage of their total doctor's degrees granted in each of 25 different fields. The resulting per centages give no information concerning the abso lute number of doctor's degrees granted by differ ent graduate schools; they do, however, give a quick picture of the fields in which the major con tributions have been made, thus yielding a sort of profile which defines the main scholarly emphasis of the particular graduate institution in question. Our next step consisted of correlating the per centage scores for each field with every other for our 30 graduate schools. Thereafter a centroid factor analysis was carried out upon the correla tion matrix, and these factors were rotated accord ing to a Varimax Program. Table I shows the loadings of each field of scholarship on the first five factors. It will be seen on inspection that the first three factors yield a large number of substan tial loadings, while the last two yield only small residual loadings, for the most part. But the im portance of the first three factors, from a statis tical point of view, is beyond dispute. It will be seen that the first factor, tentatively called a physical factor, yields high loadings (in excess of +. 60) in the fields of mathe matics, physics, and earth science. At the opposite pole of this factor stands the field of education with a negative loading of -. 70. Thus, our first factor reveals the tendency for high production in mathe matics, physics, and earth science to be associ ated together in the same institution, while high production in education is negatively correlated with these. The second factor is essentially a biological