ASSOCIATION FOR ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE, 471 



doctor of science were unknown. There was but one journal of 

 science published in the country, and foreign scientific journals and 

 reviews, comparatively weak and few at the best, seldom found their 

 way to the New World. The men who cultivated science were 

 widely separated, and for the most part rarely met their peers. As 

 a natural consequence, there must have been more or less misdi- 

 rected effort. Many a worker must have attacked problems 

 already solved, or have attacked them by inadequate or obsolete 

 methods. 



How great the changes that i5fty years have wrought in this 

 country, in the world indeed, in all these respects! Now there is 

 not a State in the Union that has not at least one fairly equipped 

 school of science, and in some of the older States such schools can 

 be counted by the dozen or the score. These schools are manned 

 by teachers trained at the foremost centers of science in this coun- 

 try and Europe, familiar with all the great problems and with all 

 the most improved metliods of research. Moreover, on the library 

 table of every one of these schools are the latest periodicals and 

 special reports of the two continents in which science is cultivated. 

 The untrained and isolated investigator can no longer justify his 

 existence. There is no occasion for the survival of such qualities 

 as these terms imply. 



This wonderful transformation in educational scope and meth- 

 ods effects to a great degree just what the founders hoped to accom- 

 plish through the agency of the association. The ground has thus 

 been cut from under the second of the objects of the association 

 as avowed in its constitution. In other words, while the result 

 aimed at deserved the prominence given to it fifty years ago, it no 

 longer depends on the association for its accomplishment. 



3. The third of the objects which the association was organized 

 to accomplish was " to procure for the labors of scientific men in- 

 creased facilities and a wider usefulness." This clause evidently 

 refers to the endowment of science by founding and equipping in- 

 stitutions, professorships, laboratories, museums, and the like, and to 

 a more cordial and general appreciation of the results of scientific 

 work. 



In this direction, also, such immense progress has been made in 

 the country at large that the need of special effort in this line no 

 longer exists. Munificent gifts to science from private fortunes 

 are now the order of the day. It is a poor year for science in 

 America when such contributions do not exceed a million dollars. 

 This work was begim in the large way under the elder Agassiz, and 

 the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Cambridge is its first im- 

 portant monument. It has gone forward in the addition of scien- 



