Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/196

186, which are doing good work in their locality. But distances are so great that it is difficult to collect men together at any one point. The American Association, which we are now attending, is not a scientific academy, and does not profess to be more than a gathering of all who are interested in science, to read papers and enjoy social intercourse. The National Academy of Sciences contains eminent men from the whole country, hut then it is only for the purpose of advising the government freely on scientific matters. It has no building, it has no library; and it publishes nothing except the information which it freely gives to the government, which does nothing for it in return. It has not had much effect directly on American science; but the liberality of the government in the way of scientific expeditions, publications, etc., is at least partly due to its influence, and in this way it has done much good. But it in no way takes the place of the great Royal Society, or the great academies of science at Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Munich, and, indeed, all the European capitals and large cities. These, by their publications, give to the young student, as well as the more advanced physicist, models of all that is considered excellent; and to become a member is one of the highest honors to which he can aspire, while to write a memoir which the academy considers worthy to be published in its transactions excites each one to his highest effort.

The American Academy of Sciences in Boston is perhaps our nearest representation of this class of academies, but its limitation of membership to the State deprives it of its national character.

But there is another matter which influences the growth of our science.

As it is necessary for us still to look abroad for our highest inspiration in pure science, and as science is not an affair of one town or one country, but of the whole world, it becomes us all to read the current journals of science and the great transactions of foreign societies, as well as those of our own countries. These great transactions and journals should be in the library of every institution of learning in the country, where science is taught. How can teachers and professors be expected to know what has been discovered in the past, or is being discovered now, if these are not provided? Has any institution a right to mentally starve the teachers whom it employs, or the students who come to it? There can be but one answer to this; and an institution calling itself a university, and not having the current scientific journals upon its table or the transactions of societies upon its library shelves, is certainly not doing its best to cultivate all that is best in this world.

We call this a free country, and yet it is the only one where there is a direct tax upon the pursuit of science. The low state of pure