Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/611

Rh The writer does not advocate exclusive use of home talent. On the contrary, he urges very general exchange, but when a state has nothing suitable for its own use exchange is impossible—it can only import.

If scholarship is worth while, if knowledge is of any value, and research productive of good, then this condition of affairs is utterly intolerable. The change to a better simply must and will be made, for no community high-minded, sensitive and capable as the south is will do anything other than welcome an honest description of things as they are, and then wherever not creditable set about to correct them.

In this case the task is a difficult one, but the need of it more than manifest, and the task weighs first and heaviest upon the presidents of the universities. Power implies duty, and theirs in the main is the power to shape the destiny of their institutions, and through them of the communities, the states and the nation of which they are a vital part.

Wherever the president of an institution gives no hearty encouragement to first-class attainments, wherever creative ability is held to disqualify a man for a position in a university rather than to be the first essential, at that place is stagnation and death in all that stimulates the scholar to his noblest efforts, and at best only a lot of weary taskmasters driving to their unwilling grinds so many human phonographs that give back just what they have taken down of the words of another.

It may not be the university president of the south that is to blame for the origin of the sterile condition of scholarship in his section, but it is to him we must look for the needed change. He may find the labor difficult, but it is possible and that is sufficient. He can not claim that his students are without the ability to follow the leadership of a master, for in the north and in Europe, wherever they have the chance, they do follow masters, and follow them to a purpose. Nor can paucity of material equipment any longer be claimed, since many of the southern institutions are equipped far beyond the extent indicated by the results turned out, and have been for a long while. Indeed for many kinds of creative work the necessary equipment is not great, and besides there are a number of sources from which the capable and the active often can secure substantial aid. Then, too, cooperation with one or another of the various scientific bureaus of the national government is eminently practical and because of the many mutual benefits earnestly to be desired. The physicist, for instance, if so inclined, can with but small expense take up the studies of atmospheric electricity, sky polarization, insolation, or any one or more of the many other interesting meteorological phenomena that are always with him, but which are not yet fully understood. In no other way could he add more to the advancement of his own subject, while at the same time he would be enriching the science of meteorology and thereby improving the art of forecasting. This is only one of many possible suggestions for even the physicist, and similar ones could be made in connection with other branches of