Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/512

508 manufacturing and business classes. In the United States in 1850, 3.1 per cent. of white men having occupations were in the professions; 44.1 were engaged in agriculture, and 34.1 in trade, transportation, manufacturing and mechanical pursuits. The professional classes have thus contributed in proportion to their numbers about fourteen times as many scientific men as the others, the agricultural classes only half as many as the manufacturing and trading classes. The farm not only produces relatively fewer scientific men, but a smaller proportion of them are of high distinction and a larger proportion are in the lowest group. This traverses a common belief, as voiced, for example, by Dr. Charles W. Eliot, when he writes:

The writer showed, however, in the previous paper that in proportion to their population cities have produced twice as many scientific men as the country.

The four professions of divinity, medicine, law and teaching, with a fifth group composed of the remaining professions—engineering, fine arts, journalism, the government service, etc.—contribute numbers of scientific men not far from equal. According to the census of 1850, the numbers in the four learned professions were: Clergymen, 26,842; lawyers, 23,939; physicians, 40,765; men teachers, 30,530. For each thousand of their members, they contributed scientific men as follows:

Clergymen, therefore, have the best record, and physicians the worst. Yet at that period there was supposed to be a conflict between science and theology, and the work of the physician is, or should be, allied to, if not identical with, that of the man of science. But in the middle of the last century the clergymen were likely to be better educated and more closely identified with the colleges than the physicians. The lawyers and the teachers were equally productive, but college professors—of whom there were only 943 in 1850—are far before any other class. The group of "other professions" is too ill defined to permit statistical treatment. In the census of 1850, mechanics who ran engines were called engineers and included among the professions. It will be noted from the table that lawyers and teachers have contributed the largest