2oo POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



would be necessary to clo more than retail what others had produced. 

 Apparently not to any extent. Scholars we had, to be sure, mainly in 

 the direction of history, and some literary men. We had indeed already 

 produced inventors in the mechanical arts, men of wonderful alertness 

 of mind, who gave a character to the national genius, and did much to 

 help us to the industrial supremacy that we to-day possess. But the 

 pursuit of searching into the laws of nature, with the object of advan- 

 cing the stock of knowledge of the human race, was then hardly thought 

 of. Who had made the great discoveries which were the chief dis- 

 tinction of the nineteenth century? In some cases persons of private 

 means, sometimes physicians, but more and more professors in the uni- 

 versities of Germany, France, England and Italy, and the smaller 

 countries of Europe. In these countries it has always been assumed 

 that the greatest intellectual activity would be found among professors 

 in the universities, who would be expected, as a matter of course, to 

 produce those fruits in the way of new knowledge that would make the 

 glory of the nation. Thus we find Napoleon, reforming everything in 

 France, surrounding himself with a scientific galaxy of the greatest 

 brilliancy, feeling that this, no less than military success, was for the 

 glory of France. Germany, hardly recovered from the effects of the 

 Napoleonic wars, set about founding new universities or strengthening 

 old ones, and their professors were constantly adding to knowledge in 

 every direction. The spirit of work and of research was the character- 

 istic spirit of the German university. Germany was in this way attain- 

 ing that intellectual primacy that no other nation may to-day dispute 

 her. In the meantime the universities of England were lagging behind 

 the scientific movement, and ours were still well in the rear of them. 

 It was not until after the successful prosecution of the Franco-Prus- 

 sian war that the appearance of Germany on the stage as a political 

 world-power began to call our attention to the real source of her power, 

 and finally the wave struck us. Young men then began to go to 

 Germany and to drink in inspiration at the fountain whence it flowed 

 so freely. When my colleague, Professor Story, reached Berlin in 

 1871 he found few Americans, but on my own arrival fifteen years 

 later the stream had swollen to a goodly number, although it had by 

 no means reached its flood. The advent of the hundreds or thousands 

 of young Americans returning from Germany full of the enthusiasm 

 for production, which it is impossible to avoid catching there, began to 

 have a very decided influence on our academic ideals, and our universi- 

 ties opened their eyes to the fact that there was no reason why we, too, 

 should not contribute to the increase of knowledge. 



Let me not be misunderstood, nor accused of claiming too much 

 for the influence of Germany. I know that there are to-day personali- 

 ties potent in the educational world who alternately pooh-pooh and 



