98 MICHAEL A. LANE 



man to work out for himself. And yet, he who even glances 

 over the works of this singular man feels instinctively that 

 there is a powerful, original and bold mind at work here; and 

 a mind too that approaches its subject reinforced with a 

 knowledge of the older sciences rare among men. In his last 

 work of note. Pure Sociology, Ward considers the science 

 of society apart from dynamics — to use that word in the 

 Wardian sense. 



This work — with one exception, which I shall speak of 

 later — is perhaps the largest single contribution to the critical 

 literature of sociology and is already a classic. It is to the 

 future perfected sociology what the works of Galen, or better 

 still, the works of Vesalius, are to modern anatomy ; and Ward 

 can be (and in the future will be) classified with pioneers such 

 as Vesalius, Schleiden, Linne, and others in the zoological 

 sciences. Ward, like most men of his peculiar kind, is a 

 vigorous, combative, highly critical, indefatigable and above 

 all voluminous writer. The most picturesque of American 

 pioneers in sociology, he is at the same time a botanist of 

 considerable ability and his work in the Smithsonian institu- 

 tion is that of a botanist. His work in sociology, so far as 

 it is possible to see from a distance, is a work of love. This 

 versatility will be recognized as the common possession of 

 most originals in science. 



Ward, I believe, is the only prominent sociologist who 

 does not occupy a chair of a university. American sociolo- 

 gists for the most part are teachers in universities and 

 colleges, and although few of them have the picturesqueness 

 and the pungency of Ward, many of them are not without 

 their own peculiar originality, force, and charm. There are 

 perhaps ten such men in America, and of these the one next 

 to Ward, who has probably done the most original and strik- 

 ing work, is Professor Simon N. Patten of the University of 

 Pennsylvania. 



Like many of the later acquisitions to the cultus of 

 American sociology. Patten was formerly an economist, and 

 of very recent years, I am told, he is reverting to that science, 

 taking with him the larger views he gained in his long and 

 painstaking investigations as a sociologist. Patten writes 



