Tlic BeoitDiings of American Science. 465 



The most effective agents for the dissemination of scientific inteUigence 

 are probably the rehgious journals, aided to some extent by the agri- 

 cultural journals and to a ver}- limited degree by the weekly and daily 

 newspapers. It is much 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 

 singularly inaccurate and unscholarly, and too often science is referred 

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



Tlie 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 establi.shed by pri- 

 vate munificence, 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 onl}^ 

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

 in every educational plan are every year more fully conceded. vScience 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 centur}- 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 strangel}' indifferent to the que.stions as to 

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

 labors. It ma}- be that the tendency to specialization is destined to deprive 

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

 of /oology, botany and geology, mineralogy and chemistry, will become 

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

 for a period of years. It ma}' ])e that we are to have no more zoologists 

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

 l)lace which such men filled in the community will be stipplied by com- 

 l)inations of a number of .specialists, each of whom knows, with more 

 niinutene.ss, limited portions of the subjects grasped bodily by the masters 

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

 to become an anachronism, and that we are all destined to become gen- 

 erically biologists, and .specifically morphologists, histologists, embrv- 

 ologi.sts, phy.siologists, or it may be cetologi.sts, chiropterologists, oologi.sts, 

 carcinologists, ophiologi.sts, helminthologists, actinologists, coleopterists, 



N.\T MUS 97, PT 2 30 



