THE PR00RE88 OF SCIENCE. 



567 



The growth of the department is 

 indicated in a general way by the 

 amounts authorized for the rent of 

 office and laboratory buildings. Start- 

 ing some twelve years ago with an 

 item of $900, the amount authorized 

 for rent of buildings has steadily in- 

 creased year by year until in the pres- 

 ent bill it amounts to $27,500. This 

 shows conclusively the inadequacy of 

 the present buildings, which led the 

 last session of congress to appropriate 

 $1,500,000 for a new agricultural build- 

 ing, plans for which are now in course 

 of preparation. 



The agricultural appropriation act 

 does not carry the appropriation for 

 printing the publications of the depart- 

 ment, except in the case of the popu- 

 lar series known as ' Farmers' Bul- 

 letins.' The department's allotment 

 out of the general printing fund is 

 $185,000, an increase of $10,000, and 

 $300,000 is provided for printing and 

 binding a half million copies of the 

 ' Year-book.' Adding to this the 

 cost of the regular and special reports, 

 which are printed by order of con- 

 gress, brings the amount for print- 

 ing the department publications up 

 to approximately three quarters of 

 a million dollars. In the last fiscal 

 year 757 separate publications were 

 issued in an aggregate edition of over 

 ten million copies, some six million 

 of which were ' Farmers' Bulletins.' 

 This is a larger number of separate 

 publications and of total copies than 

 are issued by any other department of 

 the government, and stamps the De- 

 partment of Agriculture as the great- 

 est agency in the world for the dissemi- 

 nation of popular and technical infor- 

 mation on agriculture and agricultural 

 science. 



THE QUESTION OF THE BIRTH 



RATE. 



Just one hundred years ago, in 1803, 



was published the edition of Malthus's 



' Essay on Population ' which has had 



a considerable influence on economic 



theory and aided Darwin in thinking 

 out his principle of the origin of 

 species by natural selection. Mal- 

 thusianism has become a current word 

 with somewhat sinister implications, 

 quite foreign to the spirit of the kindly 

 clergyman, who announced the theory 

 that population tends to increase more 

 rapidly than the means of subsistence. 

 If this were true population must be 

 limited by moral restraint, vice or 

 misery, and Malthus urged people not 

 to marry until they had a fair pros- 

 pect of supporting a family. Owing 

 to the applications of science during 

 the past century the means of sub- 

 sistence in civilized nations have in- 

 creased far more rapidly than the 

 population. Malthus's proposition has 

 become inverted; the production of 

 goods increases in geometrical ratio, 

 whereas the production of people occurs 

 with an ever decreasing increment. It 

 is no longer an economic question of 

 starvation, but a sociological question 

 of race suicide. 



The subject has during the past 

 month become prominent in newspaper 

 discussions owing to statements made 

 by the president of the United States 

 and by the president of Harvard Uni- 

 versity. President Eliot has shown that 

 graduates of Harvard do not repro- 

 duce themselves. Statistics from the 

 colleges for women have also been com- 

 piled which prove that the graduates 

 are not self-perpetuating. From the 

 point of view of social evolution there 

 would be certain advantages in the 

 need of recruiting the ruling classes 

 from a larger group, as this would give 

 room for natural selection. As a mat- 

 ter of fact President Eliot's conclusions 

 are contradicted by the only large 

 study of the subject at hand, that by 

 Rubin and Westergaard of Copenhagen 

 marriages. It appears from some 

 thousands of cases that while the birth 

 rate is slightly smaller for the profes- 

 sional and upper classes than for arti- 

 sans, the average number of surviving 



