57° 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tion, but the time may come when its 

 survival will be a nuisance. 



An academy may of course perform 

 valuable services as a center of organi- 

 zation. This is the case with the Royal 

 Society, which to a certain extent cor- 

 responds to the continental academies, 

 but with three or four hundred mem- 

 bers it is reasonably democratic. As 

 the eighteenth century was the era of 

 academies, the nineteenth was the era 

 of special societies for the separate sci- 

 ences and of democratic associations 

 for the advancement of science. In the 

 present century specialization will in- 

 crease still further and men of science 

 will become still more numerous; it 

 will be necessary to replace an aris- 

 tocracy and a plebescite with a repre- 

 sentative form of government. 



THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS BE- 

 FORE THE BRITISH ASSO- 

 CIATION. 

 The French Association for the Ad- 

 vancement of Science held its annual 

 meeting in August, and the correspond- 

 ing German and British associations 

 held their meetings in September. 

 Reports of these meetings have not as 

 yet come to hand, except that an ab- 

 stract of Professor James Dewar's 

 presidential address before the Belfast 

 meeting of the British Association has 

 been cabled to the daily papers. It 

 appears from this report that the ad- 

 dress was largely devoted to a review 

 of the progress of physical chemistry, 

 but reference was made to recent mu- 

 nificent benefactions to science and 

 education, especially the gifts of Mr. 

 Carnegie and the late Cecil Rhodes. 

 Professor Dewar said he thought that 

 the means chosen by Mr. Rhodes were 

 not the most effective which could have 

 been selected, but that it must be re- 

 membered that Mr. Rhodes's aims were 

 political as much as educational. " He 

 had a noble and worthy ambition to 

 promote the enduring friendship of the 

 great English-speaking communities of 

 the world, and he was probably also 



influenced by the hope that a large in- 

 flux of strangers would broaden Ox- 

 ford's notions." 



Referring to Mr. Carnegie's endow- 

 ment of Scottish universities and the 

 foundation of an institution at Wash- 

 ington as of more direct benefit to 

 higher education than the bequest of 

 Mr. Rhodes, Professor Dewar is re- 

 ported to have remarked that the es- 

 tablishment of the institution at 

 Washington meant a scouring of the 

 Old World as well as the New for the 

 best men in every department. In fact, 

 he said, the assiduous collecting of 

 brains for the benefit of America was 

 similar to the collecting of rare books 

 and works of art which Americans were 

 now carrying on so lavishly. 



Reviewing the meager gifts to the 

 Royal Institution of Great Britain dur- 

 ing the past century, he said that, 

 without such endowments as Mr. Car- 

 negie's, the outlook for disinterested 

 research was rather dark. The Car- 

 negie Institution could dispose in one 

 year of as much money as the Royal 

 Institution had expended in a century 

 on its purely scientific work, and it 

 would be interesting to note how far 

 the output of scientific work corre- 

 sponded to the hundredfold application 

 of money to its production. 



Speaking on the subject of applied 

 chemistry, Professor Dewar criticized 

 the ' deplorable backwardness' of Great 

 Britain, as compared with foreign 

 countries. Taking Germany as an ex- 

 ample, he declared that, notwithstand- 

 ing the immense range of chemical in- 

 dustries in which the United Kingdom 

 had once been prominent, Germany to- 

 day employed a professional staff 

 three times as great as the United 

 Kingdom, and as superior in technical 

 training and acquirements as it was 

 numerically. German chemical manu- 

 facturers enjoyed a practical monop- 

 oly, which enabled them to exact huge 

 profits from the rest of the world and 

 to establish in an almost unassailable 

 position industries which were largely 



