THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



285 



AMERICA'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO 

 SCIENCE 

 The award of one Nobel prize in 

 science to a citizen of the United 

 States, even though his birthplace was 

 in Germany, is a recognition as great 

 as this country may properly claim. 

 Indeed, it seems that the award in 

 physics should have been made to Kel- 

 vin, if the plan of conferring the prize 

 for distinguished services were to be 

 followed, rather than the original in- 

 structions of Nobel's will, which re- 

 quired that the prizes should be con- 

 ferred on those who contributed most 

 materially to benefit mankind during 

 the year immediately preceding. On 

 the other hand, if the prizes had been 

 conferred in accordance with the terms 

 of the will, for " the most important 

 discovery or invention in the domain 

 of physics " " contributing to the bene- 

 fit of mankind, the prize should have 

 been awarded first of all to Dr. A. 

 Graham Bell and Mr. Thomas A. Edi- 

 son. The awards in the sciences so far 

 made have been : 



The national distribution is: Ger- 

 many 7, England 4, France 3, Holland 

 2, Denmark 1, Sweden 1, Russia 1, 

 America 1, Italy %, Spain y 2 . It is 

 certainly somewhat disquieting if one 

 accept these figures as measuring the 

 scientific productivity of this country 

 as compared with others, and there is, 

 as a matter of fact, some reason to 

 fear that one out of twenty does not 

 seriously misrepresent our proportion 

 of eminent scientific men. In his 

 widely-quoted Harvard address, Mr. 

 Owen Wister allows us three of his 

 forty-three immortals. If he will 

 kindly permit us to amend his list by 



making the obvious substitution in 

 philosophy of Professor James for Pro- 

 fessor Cohen, and the addition of Pro- 

 fessor Newcomb and Dr. Hill, as as 

 tronomers without peers, we should be 

 allowed one eighth of the world's most 

 eminent scholars, which is probably a 

 larger proportion than we possess. 



That we Have not produced great 

 men in proportion to our population 

 and our wealth amply justifies the 

 arraignment which Professor Webster 

 prints in the present number of the 

 Moxthly It must, however, be re- 

 membered that in so far as scientific 

 productivity is measured by the num- 

 ber of men of international eminence 

 a country may possess, this would refer 

 to the preceding rather than to the 

 present generation. Most eminent men 

 have done their great work at least 

 thirty years ago, and it is perhaps 

 not discouraging that the possibilities, 

 for scientific work in this country 

 were small in the seventies as com- 

 pared with the opportunities to-day. 

 Whether v\e are now accomplishing 

 research proportionate in importance 

 to the numbers engaged in it and to 

 the facilities given them is a different 

 question and one which it is probably 

 impossible to answer. It appears from 

 various bibliographies that about one 

 seventh of the titles are American. 

 There are no grounds for assuming that 

 their average value is either above or 

 below that of those from other coun- 

 tries. It seems that we are clearly 

 out-classed by Germany in the number 

 and value of our scientific publications, 

 that we stand pretty close to Great 

 Britain and France, and that we are 

 surely before any other nation. Then 

 if we wish to take the patriotic and 

 optimistic point of view, we can find 

 comfort in the fact that no other na- 

 tion has in the past twenty years en- 

 joyed such a notable increase in scien- 

 tific activity. Should this activity 

 continue to increase at the same rate 

 for the next twenty years, there will 

 be no occasion to shun comparison with 

 other nations. 



