Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/609

Rh Wherever then any country is to blame for its barrenness in scientific ideas and results, this blame attaches to her universities. If a community in which a university is situated is without interest in matters of a scientific nature it is because the university itself cares but little for such things and does less.

As stated above, the south is the least productive of original work of any part of our country, and the fault lies at the doors of the southern universities—as the following several illustrations will make clear—the institutions whose duty it is to train by precept and by example. A good instance emphasizing this point is the case of a certain southern man whose name is well known to the scientific world because of his investigations while in the north. On finally accepting, after much hesitation, a position in one of the oldest and best of the southern universities he remarked pathetically in regard to his scientific career—"I am going now to be laid upon the shelf for the rest of my life." And, while he is an ornament to the faculty of which he is a member, as he would be to any other, he fully understood and correctly judged the lethal effect on all scientific aspirations of his boyhood environment,

 Where the mocking bird calls to dreams of fair women, And the soul drifts on in a somnolent ease.

But lest this be regarded as a mere isolated case, due to the peculiarities of a single individual, it may be well to describe the attitude towards creative work maintained by the heads of certain institutions.

One of these, the president of one of the largest institutions in the south, has more than once assured the writer that he regarded investigation on the part of professors as a thing which took just that much time from the students, and that therefore it should not be encouraged—a fallacy that once obtained, but outgrown more than a century ago, at one of the great northern colleges. And the pity of it is this man's opinion clearly is having an influence on his institution, for in certain of the sciences it is about as much heard of as is the Imperial University of Timbuctoo.

The president of another institution of almost boundless claims (this applies to both), when he was on the point of closing a contract with a really capable man, so runs the information from this man himself, invited him to take part in a prayer meeting. This was declined on the ground that, while a regular church attendant, he was not an active church worker. He was then informed that this particular institution raised up christian young men (by implication others did not), and that he, the president, regarded active work in the Young Men's Christian Association on the part of a professor as of more importance than his teaching.

From a certain standpoint this view of the situation may be logical enough; at any rate, the Young Men's Christian Association, in its moral uplift of college life, has a noble function to perform and per