TEE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. 



475 



fact no short stories such as those of 

 Hawthorne and Poe. Weekly journals 

 of literature have also declined. The 

 Critic could not continue as a weekly 

 and The Nation has become a compila- 

 tion from the Evening Post. 



Corresponding with the wide diffu- 

 sion of physical comfort in a democ- 

 racy we have an abundant supply of 

 Sunday newspapers, illustrated maga- 

 zines and current novels. These are 

 well adapted to the readers for whom 

 they are manufactured and demon- 

 strate a degree and extension of intel- 

 ligence which is all that could be ex- 

 pected, and is on the whole highly sat- 

 isfactory. But there appears to be no 

 intellectual development corresponding 

 with the large fortunes accumulated by 

 our captains or knights — as the case 

 may be — of industry. As far as jour- 

 nals and reviews are concerned, we 

 must frankly admit our inferiority to 

 Great Britain and France. This does 

 not, however, mean that we should or 

 shall remain quietly or permanently in 

 this position. 



We are here especially concerned 

 with science; but we do not admit that 

 science and literature can be divorced. 

 Science supplies to literature both 

 method and subject matter, whereas 

 clear and correct expression is essential 

 to science. There are a few American 

 men of science who have admirable 

 command of the language they write, 

 but the men with exceptional powers 

 of expression are rarer and the average 

 is lower than in France or in Great 

 Britain. The treatment of science in 

 the newspapers and magazines is also 

 less satisfactory here than abroad. 

 Articles of excellent quality are often 

 published, but fads and charlatanism 

 are exploited with equal apparent au- 

 thority, and the reader must become 

 entirely bewildered, having no means 

 of discriminating one alleged scientific 

 article from another, and the entire 

 scientific miscellany is given about the 

 same attention and credence as the col- 

 umns devoted to the gossip from Sara- 



toga. Some newspapers and magazines 

 are better than others, but there ap- 

 pears not to be a single one of them 

 that submits its scientific contributions 

 to an expert. Hence while the literary 

 taste of the community is mediocre, 

 its scientific sense is practically non- 

 existent. 



A. GRADUATE SCHOOL OF AGRI- 

 CULTURE. 

 The Graduate School of Agriculture, 

 which held a four weeks' session dur- 

 ing the month of July at the Ohio 

 State University, Columbus, Ohio, 

 marks an important step of progress 

 in agricultural science and education 

 in the United States. This school was 

 the outcome of a happy thought which 

 came to Professor Thomas F. Hunt, 

 dean of the College of Agriculture and 

 Domestic Science of the Ohio State Uni- 

 versity, while he was attending the con- 

 vention of the Association of American 

 Agricultural Colleges and Experiment 

 Stations at San Francisco in 1899. 

 Seeing how inadequate were the oppor- 

 tunities at such short conventions for 

 the discussion of anything more than 

 the most general problems of agricul- 

 tural science and education it occurred 

 to him that it would be a good plan 

 to establish a summer school for ad- 

 vanced students of agriculture at which 

 leading teachers and investigators from 

 the agricultural colleges and experi- 

 ment stations and the United States 

 Department of Agriculture should pre- 

 sent in some regular way summaries 

 of the recent progress of agricultural 

 science, illustrate improved methods of 

 teaching agricultural subjects and af- 

 ford a somewhat extended opportunity 

 for the discussion of live topics drawn 

 from the rapidly advancing science of 

 agriculture. This idea received the 

 cordial approval of President Thomp- 

 son of the Ohio State University, and 

 on the recommendation of these two 

 men the board of trustees of the uni- 

 versity voted to establish such a school 



