The most effective at^ents for the disscinination of scientific iiitelhgence 

 are probably the rehj^^ious journals, aided to some extent by the agri- 

 cultnral journals and to a very limited degree by the weekly and daily 

 newspapers. It is nnich to be regretted that several influential journals, 

 which ten or fifteen years ago gave attention to the publication of trust- 

 worthy scientific intelligence, have of late almost entirely abandoned the 

 effort. The allusions to science in the majority of our newspapers are 

 singularl}^ inaccurate and unscholarly, and too often science is referred 

 to only when some of its achievements offer opportunity for witticism. 



The statements which I have just made may, as I have said, prove in 

 some instances erroneous and to .some extent misleading, but I think the 

 general tendency of a careful study of the distribution of scientific men 

 and institutions is to show that the people of the United States, except 

 in so far as they sanction by their approval the work of the scientific 

 departments of the Government and the institutions established by pri- 

 vate numificence, have little reason to be proud of the national attitude 

 toward science. 



I am, however, by no means despondent for the future. The impor- 

 tance of scientific work is thoroughly appreciated, and it is well under- 

 stood that many important public duties can be performed properly only 

 by trained men of science. The claims of science to a prominent place 

 in ever}' educational plan are every year more fully conceded. Science is 

 permeating the theory and the practice of every art and every industry, as 

 well as every department of learning. The greatest danger to science is 

 perhaps the fact that all who have studied at all within the last quarter 

 of a century have studied its rudiments and feel competent to employ its 

 methods and its language and to form judgments on the merits of current 

 work. 



In the meantime the professional men of science, the scholars, and the 

 investigators .seem to me to be strangely indifferent to the questions as to 

 how the public at large is to be made familiar with the results of their 

 labors. It may be that the tendency to specialization is destined to deprive 

 the sciences of their former hold upon popular interest, and that the study 

 of zoolog}', botany and geology, mineralog}^ and chemistrj^ will become 

 so technical, that each will require the exclusive attention of its votaries 

 for a period of years. It may be that we are to have no more zoologists 

 such as Agassiz and Baird, no more botanists such as Gray, and that the 

 place which such men filled in the community will be supplied by com- 

 binations of a number of .specialists, each of whom knows, with more 

 minuteness, limited portions of the subjectsgraspedbodily by the masters 

 of the last generation. It may be that the use of the word naturali-st is 

 to become an anachroni.sm, and that we are all destined to become gen- 

 erically biologists, and specifically morphologists, hi.stologists, embry- 

 ologists, phy.siologists, or it maybe cetologists, chiropterologi.sts, oologists, 

 carcinologists, ophiologists, helminthologists, actinologists, coleopterists, 

 NAT MUS 97, PT 2 30 



