SCIENTIFIC WORK OF THE GOVERNMENT 43 



as these mounds. The mound builders were supposed 

 to be a strange, mysterious, extinct race who had their own 

 civilization; and it was once believed that the American 

 Indians destroyed them and most of their works. 



American ethnologists, however, have satisfactorily 

 solved the problem by showing that the mound builders 

 were none other than our own American tribes who built 

 the mounds for religious and funerary purposes, but whose 

 peaceful ways of life were disturbed by the advent of the 

 white marauders who came from Europe after the discovery 

 of America. Another cause of the disruption of this Indian 

 custom was, it is held, the arrival of the buffalo in large 

 numbers, which moved the mound builders to take to a hunt- 

 ing life, and thus caused them to become out and out nomads. 



So much for the unpractical part of the government's 

 patronage of science. When we come to the practical, how- 

 ever, there is no lack of government support. The govern- 

 ment spends every year upwards of $75,000 on astronomy, 

 the center of activity being the national observatory, which 

 serves the useful end of keeping the national time. It is 

 a comfort to know that you can set your watch by the sun — 

 or, rather, let us say, by the stars, for time is corrected by 

 the stars. Every day at noon the national observatory 

 sends out its time over the wires of the Western Union com- 

 pany which are, at that moment, cleared of all messages to 

 all parts of the country. This correct time goes to all sea- 

 ports, all cities, and all other places that can find a use for it. 



Perhaps the most fetchingly practical work of govern- 

 ment science, however, is that done by the various bureaus 

 of the department of agriculture, which uses up more than 

 one half of the total expenditures for scientific purposes made 

 by the government. At the present rate of progress in this 

 direction, the agriculture of the United States will, within less 

 than twenty five years, become as nearly an ideal system as 

 present individualistic methods of industry will permit. 

 Should the government itself go into the farming business — 

 as some bold theorists suggest — it would only be following up 

 the logical trend of what it is now actually doing — for there 

 is nothing that the American farmer wants in the way of new 



