Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/419

Rh giving its members adequate salaries and great freedom and opportunity to prosecute their work.

The Carnegie Institution undertakes to conduct work not only all over this country, but, as is indicated by the illustration, here reproduced from the annual volume, all over the world. With good men at the start, this works well, but one may have misgivings as to the ultimate outcome of widely scattered research work and scientific men directed by a president from an administration building in Washington. The Carnegie Institution would probably have done better either to have established a research university at Washington or else to have used its revenue to endow independent research institutions for special lines of work in different places.

The most desirable institutions for scientific work would probably be comparatively small laboratories conducted by the scientific men who work in them, subject only to some democratic control in case of need. Such laboratories, with small groups of investigators, having similar interests and attracting to them assistants and advanced students, would develop the spirit of cooperation and devotion which is likely to wither under the touch of superior officials and administrative machinery. It would be well if such institutions were endowed by the rich, still better if they were supported by a state or a community.

the training-school for feeble-minded children at Vineland, N. J., is a girl whose ancestry has been traced by Dr. H. H. Goddard and is now published in a small book under the title "The Kallikak Family." The results are of general interest, both as a contribution to our knowledge of the workings of heredity and as a proof of the need of practical measures for eliminating feeble-mindedness and lessening vice and criminality in the community. The feeble-minded girl, Deborah, is a typical moron who may be self-supporting