Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/175

Rh, e. g., the botany at the University of Wyoming, these facilities are extremely good. It will also be clear that there are several resident naturalists within our area pushing forward the work to the best of their ability. Thus the outlook is in many ways satisfactory, but there are still great difficulties to be overcome. It is evident that the men already in the field can not nearly cover it; instead of a dozen or so, we need at least a hundred active workers, and a thousand would not find their hands idle. This is Utopian talk, of course; but I do think that the first need is to increase the working force. Then again, those who are at work, almost without exception, have to get their living in other ways, and thus can give comparatively little time to research. In the experiment stations, research is well provided for, but the popular clamor for 'practical' investigations and immediate results usually prevents the undertaking of anything very broad or fundamental. Furthermore, the experiment station officers mostly have to do a large amount of teaching. In the colleges and universities, teaching is naturally to the front, and in our mountain states this does not mean the teaching of graduate students to more than a very limited extent. A short time ago I appealed to the professor of chemistry in one of the Colorado institutions to do a piece of work of scientific and economic value. He immediately said that he longed to do it, 'but what can I do? I am giving seven courses!' This is a fairly typical case, and although I know very well there are many who would not do anything as investigators if they had the time, the fact remains that those who would, and in fact do, are handicapped to an extent little appreciated or understood. It is not that research is disliked; if anything is done it usually meets with approval, but it is not understood that it is fundamentally necessary to progress, and that it requires time as well as space to flourish in. Much of what has stood for culture in the west has been little better than a sort of intellectual parasitism on the east and Europe, and there is not yet an understanding or appreciation of the efforts to form an endemic product.

On the other hand, those who have accumulated wealth, or in some manner have acquired the means of living at the expense of others, will find in the mountain states ample opportunity. There are, of course, many such people, but with very rare exceptions they do not take to biological subjects. The well-to-do amateur is, for some reason, extremely scarce among us, though in England, for instance, his kind has done wonders. Thus there is plenty to praise and plenty to blame; but the only thing to do is to go ahead, and if the car of progress moves slowly, at all events it perceptibly moves.