Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/856

832 for the time in touch with the great national association. Xor is this aspect dependent upon a large attendance: indeed, the meetings in smaller cities and at less conspicuous and accessible points have had perhaps quite as important an influence on the country as the great gatherings that are regarded as most "successful." The association has a twofold work—for its own membership and for the public;—and it may be that while the large meetings yield more of enjoyment and advantage to the former, the small meetings have relatively more important influence on the latter.

Amid the overwhelming attentions and courtesies of the recent meeting in Boston, there were some who felt almost embarrassed by the sense of being so largely recipients rather than givers. The circumstances, however, gave this character to the meeting; Boston was able to do it, and proud to do it. Younger or smaller cities, with less wealth of institutions and resources—literary, scientific, and historical—could not do the like. There the conditions would be reversed, and the association would be the giver rather than the receiver. One marked circumstance may illustrate this aspect. It has been the custom of the association to give one or two public evening lectures, "complimentary to the citizens" of the place, on important or attractive scientific topics; these have been prominent features of popular interest during the week of the meeting. This year the only evening lecture was rather for the benefit of the members, an exposition of the elaborate system of parks and water works of the city, in which engineering, sanitation, and aesthetic taste have been united to a degree unequaled elsewhere in the country.

If we turn, in closing, to the future of the association, and present some suggestions as to its enlarged usefulness and success, this would be one of the most important lines of thought—the association as an educating force. Standing as it does between both the local societies and the specialist societies, limited as these are by neighborhood and by subjects respectively, and the more advanced and select National Academy, the association may be likened in position to the college, standing between the schools and academies and the advanced work of the universities and professional institutions. It is the only body, in its very nature and scope, that can bring genuine science before and among the people at large. The "advancement of science" has two aspects—the increase of numbers, of intercourse, and of quality, among scientific students and workers, and the diffusion of sound and accurate scientific information among the intelligent but nonprofessional public. Both these ideas were aimed at in the plan of the association; both of them have been largely realized in its history, but the latter has rather been subordinate to the former. In its new half century, the educational function should doubtless hold