Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/207

Rh of the association. The section of education, not hitherto represented in the presidency, was able to provide a president of great distinction, Dr. Charles W. Eliot, emeritus president of Harvard University, once professor of chemistry, for more than forty years our leader in education.

The council of the American Association is the body in this country best organized to advance the interests of science. It includes the past presidents of the association, who give a certain stability and dignity, but is otherwise an elected body, representing directly or indirectly the different sections of the association and the national scientific societies. Each affiliated society, of which there are some thirty, is represented in the council, which thus becomes a body representing the eight thousand members of the association and practically every scientific man of the country.

The National Academy of Sciences is by law the scientific adviser of the government, but, as is shown in the recently published volume commemorating its fiftieth anniversary, the advice of the academy has been asked only once in the past ten years, and the report was pigeon-holed. The fact is that the vast increase of the scientific work



Vice-president of the Section for Geology and Geography, geologist, U. S. Geological Survey.