Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 72.djvu/387

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that a scientific journal should be supported by the subscribers. Yet there is reason to believe that a good popular scientific journal would accomplish as much for the instruction and entertainment of the public as one of our leading museums, whereas the cost of conducting a museum for a single year would give the journal an ample permanent endowment. But it is by no means certain that it would be an advantage for our scientific journals to be supported by endowments or subsidies. A public spirited and enlightened individualism, which would lead people in large numbers to subscribe to journals of educational value, to pay the entrance fees to museums and for tickets to scientific lectures, would in some ways be more satisfactory than the amplest endowments. Valparaiso University and Harvard University, Mr. Edison's laboratory and the Carnegie Institution, stand for diverse methods of solving problems of momentous importance. It may be that Valparaiso University and Mr. Edison's laboratory are the more