Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/621

Rh of the department of chemistry, Harvard University, and Professor Stratton, director of the National Bureau of Standards.

National Academy of Sciences is meeting in St. Louis as this issue of the goes to press; the American Association for the Advancement of Science, with a number of affiliated societies, will hold its convocation week meeting in Minneapolis at the end of December. The National Academy has only once before since its foundation in 1863 held a meeting west of the Atlantic seaboard. This meeting was at Chicago in the autumn of 1903 and was fully as successful as the autumn meetings in eastern cities. The American Association for the Advancement of Science has been more national in the range of its meetings, having in 1901 gone as far west as Denver and in 1905 as far south as New Orleans. It met in St. Louis in 1903, in Madison in 1893 and in Minneapolis in 1883. Some of the affiliated societies which last year met with the association will not go to Minneapolis, there being scientific meetings in Ithaca, New Haven, Princeton and Pittsburgh. Still the number of scientific men in the middle west is now so large that a successful meeting at Minneapolis is assured. The University of Minnesota is one of the great state institutions; in recent years it has had a notable growth, and its future is assured by the immense fund which the state holds for educational purposes.

The fact that scientific men and their leaders are no longer concentrated on the eastern seaboard is indicated by the residences of the retiring and the incoming presidents of the American Association—President Jordan on the Pacific coast and Professor Michelson in Chicago. A statistical study of the origin and distribution of American men of science, recently made by the editor of this journal and published in the issues of for November 4 and 11, shows that the central and western states now possess a fair proportion of our leading scientific men and that they produce even more than they retain. The thousand leading scientific men of the country were selected by asking ten eminent men of science in each of twelve sciences to arrange those who had done research work in the order of the value of their work.

Of these leading scientific men there were in Boston 126, in New York 120 and in Washington 109. These three cities remain our chief scientific centers, but none the less there has been a significant westward movement in recent years. The list referred to has been made up twice, and it is possible to give the changes which have taken place in four years. In this short period the University of Chicago has gained nine men, the University of Illinois eleven and the University of Wisconsin twelve.

Even more significant is-a consideration of the origin of the 238 men who have attained scientific standing between the compilation of the two lists and obtain for the first time this year a place among the thousand. Massachusetts has the highest birthrate of scientific men now as before, but it has sunk from 109 per million of its population to 85. The productivity has fallen in every one of the Atlantic states, from 47 to 36 in New York, from 42 to 17 in New Jersey, from 23 to 19 in Pennsylvania and from 38 to 13 in Maryland. On the other hand, it has increased in all but one of the north central states, from 36 to 74 in Michigan, which state now stands next to Massachusetts as a center for the production of scientific men.

Most of the north central states do not as yet retain the men whom they produce. Thus twice as many have been born in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana as reside in those states. Still the