THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



613 



THE PKOGKESS OF SCIENCE 



THE ANNIVESSAEY MEETING OF ! 



THE NATIONAL ACADEMY 



OF SCIENCES 



The National Academy of Sciences 

 celebrated the semi-centennial anniver- 

 sary of its foundation on April 22, 23 

 and 24, exactly fifty years after its ; 

 first meeting. It was a most successful 

 meeting with the largest attendance of 

 members in the history of the academy. 

 There was no program of technical , 

 papers, but in its place a series of 

 addresses. Dr. Ira Eemsen, the presi- 

 dent of the academy, at the first session 

 read an address on the history of the 

 academy, and then introduced Presi- 

 dent Arthur T. Hadley, of Yale Uni- 

 versity, who spoke on "The Eelation 

 of Science to Higher Education in 

 America." In his usual happy style 

 he traced the increased part played 

 by science in modern education and 

 pointed out that his father, James 

 Hadley, taught Greek at Yale more in 

 accord with the methods of modern 

 science, than was the case with physics, 

 chemistry and biology in those days. 

 James Hadley was elected to member- 

 ship in the academy the year after its 

 foundation, followed two years later 

 by the election of another distinguished 

 Yale philologist, William Dwight Whit- 

 ney. There were also eminent econo- 

 mists in the academy, and the question 

 may fairly be raised, though President 

 Hadley did not do so, whether it would 

 not be better for the academy to in- 

 clude in its scope the philosophical, his- 

 torical and political sciences, instead of 

 confining the membership to the nat- 

 ural and exact sciences. 



The second formal address was read 

 by Dr. Arthur Schuster, secretary of 

 the Royal Society of London, who 

 discussed ' ' International Cooperation 

 in Research. " He stated that the 

 strength of modern science lies not so 

 much in the production of commanding 



genius as in an army of competent 

 investigators. Problems in which use- 

 ful results have already been obtained 

 by international cooperation were re- 

 viewed, but scarcely in the ' ' great 

 variety" promised at the beginning of 

 the address, for only those were men- 

 tioned in which the speaker was per- 

 sonally interested; all those concerned 

 with the biological sciences, and most 

 of those concerned with the exact sci- 

 ences and their applications being ig- 

 nored. The three categories of scien- 

 tific cooperation mentioned — namely, 

 the agreements on units of measure- 

 ment, the distribution of work between 

 different nations for ecenomy and the 

 making of similar observations with 

 similar instruments — cover but a small 

 part of the field. Still the subjects 

 reviewed — the Star Catalogue; the 

 International Catalogue of Scientific 

 Literature; Geophysics, and the Solar 

 Union — illustrate sufficiently the advan- 

 tages, and, it may be added, the diffi- 

 culties, of international cooperation. 

 Dr. Schuster perhaps went out of his 

 way to ridicule the Belgian scheme for 

 international associations and is too 

 hopeful as to what the International 

 Association of Academies may accom- 

 plish. Academies, national and inter- 

 national, must be placed on a represen- 

 tative democratic basis before they 

 can represent the scientific men and 

 the scientific work of the nation or of 

 the world. 



The two other addresses were on 

 special scientific problems to which 

 their authors have made distinguished 

 contributions. Dr. George E. Hale, 

 director of the Mt. Wilson Solar Ob- 

 servatory, had as his subject "The 

 Earth and Sun as Magnets ' ' ; Dr. J. C. 

 Kapteyn, director of the astronomical 

 laboratory of the University of Gron- 

 ingen, ' ' The Structure of the Uni- 

 verse. ' ' Both of these addresses 



