92 MICHAEL A. LANE 



We are often moved to ask the question, Why is it that 

 America has not produced a scholar of world wide renowrij 

 whose name is known to everybody that reads the newspapers ; 

 a Huxley, a Darwin, a Helmholtz, a Humboldt? Why is it 

 that the United States has not been able to give birth to a 

 man of science from whose work a new period of knowledge 

 is dated, with whose discoveries a new vista of nature has been 

 opened up to the human eye? 



I think an answer to the question will be found if we turn 

 to the achievements of American genius in that line which is 

 peculiarly America's own. We are an industrial people; 

 hence we have produced the greatest masters of industry in 

 the history of the world. We are a busy people; hence we 

 have produced men who, by their ingenious inventions, have 

 doubled the productivity of industry and reduced the working 

 time by one half. We are a wealth loving people; hence our 

 ideal has been that of commercial supremacy for the nation 

 and of fortune for the individual man. 



In these circumstances it could hardly have been expected 

 that we had been competent successfully to cultivate in our 

 intellectual garden such rare plants as the great men whose 

 names are mentioned above; nor is it any derogation of our 

 dignity that such is the fact. 



And yet, within comparatively recent years, there has 

 grown up in America a cult — if I may so call it — which 

 promises, with time, to produce a scholar who will take his 

 place beside the fathers of supreme generalizations, and who 

 will probably be the first American man of science of that kind. 



If we strike out of our considerations a very few of the 

 more widely known American astronomers, the original 

 scientific work thus far done in America will be found to have 

 been done by investigators who have devoted their attention 

 almost wholly to the science of economics and to the broader 

 science that is growing out of economics. I mean that young 

 and vigorous science that is now called sociology. If the 

 United States is to produce a master mind in scholarship, I 

 fancy that it will be in this line, or rather that the first of the 

 great American scholars of the future will be a sociologist. 

 There are many excellent arguments to support this view, 



