Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/489

Rh doctor of science were unknown. There was but one journal of science published in the country, and foreign scientific journals and reviews, comparatively weak and few at the best, seldom found their way to the New World. The men who cultivated science were widely separated, and for the most part rarely met their peers. As a natural consequence, there must have been more or less misdirected effort. Many a worker must have attacked problems already solved, or have attacked them by inadequate or obsolete methods.

How great the changes that fifty years have wrought in this country, in the world indeed, in all these respects! Now there is not a State in the Union that has not at least one fairly equipped school of science, and in some of the older States such schools can be counted by the dozen or the score. These schools are manned by teachers trained at the foremost centers of science in this country and Europe, familiar with all the great problems and with all the most improved methods of research. Moreover, on the library table of every one of these schools are the latest periodicals and special reports of the two continents in which science is cultivated. The untrained and isolated investigator can no longer justify his existence. There is no occasion for the survival of such qualities as these terms imply.

This wonderful transformation in educational scope and methods effects to a great degree just what the founders hoped to accomplish through the agency of the association. The ground has thus been cut from under the second of the objects of the association as avowed in its constitution. In other words, while the result aimed at deserved the prominence given to it fifty years ago, it no longer depends on the association for its accomplishment.

3. The third of the objects which the association was organized to accomplish was "to procure for the labors of scientific men increased facilities and a wider usefulness." This clause evidently refers to the endowment of science by founding and equipping institutions, professorships, laboratories, museums, and the like, and to a more cordial and general appreciation of the results of scientific work.

In this direction, also, such immense progress has been made in the country at large that the need of special effort in this line no longer exists. Munificent gifts to science from private fortunes are now the order of the day. It is a poor year for science in America when such contributions do not exceed a million dollars. This work was begun in the large way under the elder Agassiz, and the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy at Cambridge is its first important monument. It has gone forward in the addition of