Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/620

616 however, as compared with other professions, is now underestimated. The rich man who employs a lawyer and a physician who charge at the rate of $50,000 a year, regards a thousand dollar a year teacher as good enough for his children. The teacher is not as a rule underpaid, but is a man of inferior ability and character.

The difficulty in the case of the relatively small salaries paid to assistant professors and professors is not so much that they are underpaid, as that universities and colleges are satisfied with men who are worth so little. It is, however, true that these institutions depend on the dignity and prestige of the position to attract men, and use this motive in place of salary. The result of this policy, however, is to lower the prestige of the position, so that it can not permanently be used in this way.

But while we may depend on the competitive system to adjust the salaries of teachers and only try to increase in the community the appreciation of the importance of having able and well-trained men, there still remains the problem of how we are to encourage and pay for original research and productive scholarship. These are in the main a by-product of the work of the teacher and are not paid for directly. Institutions want the credit of having men of scientific distinction and men value the honor which follows scientific achievement. But these motives are not sufficient, and become less so as the total number of scientific men increases. While the average salary paid to teachers may be about the same as in the other professions, the leaders do not receive salaries commensurate with the incomes of the leading lawyers, physicians, journalists or even clergymen. Under existing conditions it is probably desirable that they should receive larger rewards in order that society may have the ablest men in its direct service and may give them the strongest motives to do their best work. It is certainly little less than a scandal that the effective salaries of university professors should have been greatly reduced in the course of the past ten years.

has taken one more of the great men who gave distinction to the Victorian era. Hooker, Wallace, Lister and Galton are left, but the period is now closing which gave Great Britain such distinction in science as has seldom been equaled in any field or in any country. It is indeed possible that the science of Great Britain in the nineteenth century is the greatest achievement of our race.

Huggins was born in London in 1824. He was privately educated, and held no university or other position, but with ample means erected for himself in 1856 an observatory at Tulse Hill. He took the lead in applying the spectroscope to astronomy and may be regarded as the founder of the science of astrophysics. In his work he had the constant assistance of Lady Huggins. He was president of the Royal Society and one of the five scientific members of the order of merit. We hope to give in some subsequent issue an appreciation of his great contributions to science.

adequate life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs, has been written by Professor Silvanus P. Thompson and published by Macmillan and Co. Although an editorial note on Lord Kelvin's life and work was published in a recent issue of the (November, 1909), too much honor can not be paid to one of the greatest geniuses of the nineteethnineteenth [sic] century. We reproduce two from the many interesting portraits which are included in the volumes and Professor Thompson's final paragraph. After describing the funeral in Westminster Abbey, he writes: "For once, in the