9 2 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



social and other arrangements made in 

 Philadelphia could scarcely be equalled 

 in any other city. Philadelphia must 

 share with Washington, New York, 

 Boston, Chicago and other cities the 

 honor of being one of our chief scien- 

 tific centers, but its Philosophical Soci- 

 ety still retains a certain preeminence. 



SOCIETIES FOR THE SCIENTIFIC 

 STUDY OF EDUCATION. 

 The backwardness of education as a 

 science is borne witness to by the lack 

 of professional societies such as exist 

 for other sciences. It is a sign of pro- 

 gress, therefore, that at the last meet- 

 ing of the British Association an edu- 

 cational section was established and that 

 the first meeting of an 'American So- 

 ciety for the Scientific Study of Educa- 

 tion 'met recently in connection with the 

 meeting of the Department of Superin- 

 tendence of the National Educational 

 Association. At the same time and 

 place there was held a conference of 

 teachers of education in American col- 

 leges who considered steps toward for- 

 mal organization and elected as chair- 

 man, Professor John Dewey, of Chicago 

 University, and as secretary, Professor 

 M. V. O'Shea, of the University of 

 Wisconsin. Both these organizations 

 seem likely to become more and more 

 societies of experts in the scientific 

 treatment of educational problems 

 rather than of men of practical in- 

 fluence in the management of school 

 systems, and may seek affiliation with 

 other scientific societies in the Ameri- 

 can Association. Next year, however, 

 the Society for the Scientific Study of 

 Education, and probably also the con- 

 ference of college instructors, will meet 

 with the Department of Superintend- 

 ence of the National Educational Asso- 

 ciation. One of the functions of such 

 societies is to judge as a jury of peers 

 the value of the discoveries and 

 hypotheses made by its members. To 

 the lack of any association of sufficient 

 weight to perform this service is due in 

 part the sufferance of educational fads 



and the paucity of serious investiga- 

 tions of the facts of school life. The 

 impulse to research is dependent upon 

 emulation, pride and practical wants, 

 and the direction it takes depends still 

 more upon social considerations. Pub- 

 licity and esteem for intellectual work 

 are among the agencies that assist 

 progress in any field of thought. 

 Organizations composed of experts in 

 the study of education might also 

 cooperate with other learned and scien- 

 tific societies in important ways. The 

 men now engaged in the promotion of 

 knowledge through research and 

 through the training of advanced stu- 

 dents exert but slight influence in im- 

 proving the teaching of the millions 

 of children in the schools, and they mil 

 rarely be fit to do so directly. But 

 a society formed of students of educa- 

 tion who were their university asso- 

 ciates might make use of both the 

 knowledge and the reputation of these 

 experts, and at the same time amend 

 their recommendations to suit the 

 actual conditions of school work. The 

 recommendation of the British Asso- 

 ciation for the Advancement of Science 

 has been thus used to support meas- 

 ures of reform in the teaching of 

 geometry in Great Britain. In our own 

 country such a formal organization of 

 expert students of education might 

 have led the National Educational 

 Association to insist that the teaching 

 of physiology be put beyond the reach 

 of politics and one-sided enthusiasts. 



BIOGRAPHIES OF EMINENT 

 CHEMISTS. 

 In our notice of the biography of 

 the Swiss chemist Schonbein, in the 

 Popular Science Monthly for April, 

 we followed custom in giving him 

 credit for discovering the passivity of 

 iron, but the peculiar behavior of this 

 metal induced by nitric acid had 

 actually been observed forty-five years 

 before by the English chemical manu- 

 facturer, James Keir. In his paper on 

 the ' Dissolution of Metals in Acids,' 



