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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Palace of Electricity. 



audience which probably averaged 

 about fifty, consisting in part of 

 specialists and in part of chance 

 visitors. It was but seldom that stu- 

 dents of one science listened to speakers 

 in another,, and the opportunities to 

 become personally acquainted were in- 

 adequate. Officers of the army of 

 science were paid to be present, but 

 the rank and file of American workers 

 were not there. And this was largely 

 the fault of defective organization. We 

 have, apart from the national scien- 

 tific societies and local academies, at 

 least four institutions which should 

 have worked in harmony with the con- 



gress — the American Association for 

 the Advancement of Science, the Na- 

 tional Academy of Sciences, the Smith- 

 sonian Institution and the Carnegie 

 Institution. But the cooperation of 

 none of these bodies was secured, the 

 head of none of them was present at St. 

 Louis. They even worked at cross 

 purposes, the American Association 

 having met at St. Louis last Christmas 

 and the National Academy having met 

 at Chicago in November. An attempt 

 to unify science which made no use of 

 existing organizations was seriously at 

 fault. The management also failed to 

 bring science and scholarship into con- 



