October 3, 1907] 



NATURE 



565 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 

 [The Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions 

 expressed by his correspondents. Neither can he undertake 

 to return, or to correspond with the writers of, rejected 

 manuscripts intendel for this or any other part of Nature. 

 So notice is taken of anonymous communications.] 



Science and Government. 



No one will contest the principle that it is in every way 

 desirable that the State should support liberally such kinds 

 of scientific work as are beyond the means of private 

 institutions or individuals, it is, for e.xample, a scandal 

 that the relatively small sum is not forthcoming which 

 would bring our Ordnance Survey into touch with modern 

 geodesy ; but the importance of such matters will not be 

 appreciated until the literary atmosphere in which our 

 statcmen and officials are reared is penetrated by a scien- 

 tific way of thinking. Nor is there at present any widely 

 spread educated opinion which might react on the Govern- 

 ment. A member of the House of Commons stated in his 

 place that the sooner coal is exhausted the better, as 

 electricity will do its work. One of our important journals 

 thinks it plausible that the Jamaica earthquake should 

 have been predicted in Europe by the " weather plant," 

 and that telegony may have some bearing on marriage 

 with a deceased wife's sister. 



But 1 am by no means convinced that the argumentum 

 ad hominem contained in your issue for September 12 is 

 very helpful. Taking the revenues of the United States 

 and of the United Kingdom as approximately equal, the 

 disparity between an expenditure of (say) 2J and \ millions 

 on "science" is at first sight overwhelming » but a little 

 analysis of the figures w-ill, I think, put a somewhat 

 different construction upon them. 



Of the total, the Department of Agriculture and that of 

 Commerce and Labour take 2,107,670!., or say two 

 millions. It is assumed that the whole of this goes to 

 scientific work. It would be less inaccurate to describe 

 it as applied to technical purposes ; but even that would 

 not quite correctly state the position. 



The United States Department of Agriculture publishes 

 an annual report in a bulky volume. Its contents deal 

 largely with purely administrative matters ; the rest is 

 mostly educational, even popular, and can scarcely be re- 

 garded as adding much to agricultural science. Nor is 

 it intended to do so. The object of the department is 

 rather to disseminate and apply existing knowledge than 

 to add to it by advanced research. The explanation is 

 obvious ; agriculture is the fundamental industry of a 

 country which Is still largely in the condition of an un- 

 developed estate, and cultivation is carried on by a popula- 

 tion which is to a considerable extent only imperfectly 

 instructed in the art. -Agriculture in the United States is 

 far from having reached its intensive stage ; this may be 

 illustrated by the fact that while the mean production of 

 wheat in the United Kingdom is thirty bushels to the 

 acre, in the United States it is only thirteen. 



The expenditure of the United States Government on 

 Agriculture is rather a political necessity than the out- 

 come of sympathy for science. All other industries are 

 protected by a tariff; but protection is useless for agri- 

 culture which has to export Its surplus produce, and it 

 is probable that by restricting the imports by which the 

 exported produce Is paid for, protection diminishes the 

 exchange value of what the farmer produces. The United 

 States Government is therefore compelled practically to 

 subsidise the farmer In various indirect ways — by the free 

 distribution of seed, for example — as It cannot directly 

 protect him. The writer in Nature has omitted to set 

 out In comparison what Is done for agriculture In the 

 United Kingdom. The Board of Agriculture and Fisheries 

 has a vote of 130,355!., and the Irish Department of 

 Agriculture and Technical Instruction one of 190,146!., 

 or 320,481!. in all. Now the area of the United Kingdom 

 is one-thlrtleth that of the United States ; but our State 

 expenditure is per square mile 4J times as great. It 

 should be noted that this includes Kew and the Ordnance 

 Survey. 



But this is not the only omission on the per contra side 

 of the account which appears to me likely to be extremely 



misleading to foreign readers of Nature. I shall not 

 attempt to make iable II. complete, as I have not the 

 means at hand. But there is no mention of the Royal 

 College of Science (including the School of Mines) in 

 London or of the similar institutions in Dublin ; one of 

 the science museums, the Government Laboratory, the 

 Standards Department, the Patent Oflice Library, the 

 Oxford I-orest School, the Botanic Gardens at Edinburgh 

 and Dublin, and the research work of the Local Govern- 

 ment Board. Nor should the ethnographic department at 

 the British .Museum (Bloomsbury) be overlooked. 



Ihe first three heads in Table I. represent what the 

 United States Government does for pure, i.e. for non- 

 technical, science. They amount to 382,690!., after deduct- 

 ing the casual and temporary item of 250,000!. for building ; 

 but a further deduction of 107,000!. must be made for 

 surveying public lands and forest reserves, as these are 

 merely administrative services. This brings the expendi- 

 ture on pure science down to 175,090!., an amount which 

 does not strike me as anything to be particularly proud of. 



The fact is that the attitude to science of .American 

 statesmen is not very different from that of our own ; indeed, 

 on the whole, I doubt if it be not even less sympathetic. 

 The Smithsonian Institution has become an independent 

 trust something like our British Museum, and the fact 

 may be recalled that it owes Its foundation to the munifi- 

 cence of an Englishman. It is by no means liberally sub- 

 sidised by the Government. Nor has the United States 

 any national botanic establishment on the scale of Kew. 



\\'hat one would like to find imitated in this country 

 Is the noble idealism which impels those who are possessed 

 of great wealth in the United .States to place it at the 

 disposal of the community for the advancement of learn- 

 ing. Our own Royal Society might be entrusted with 

 funds which it would know how to apply to purely scien- 

 tific purposes. This would be more useful than giving of 

 medals and scholarships to distribute. Our ancient uni- 

 versities, Oxford and Cambridge, are in urgent need of 

 endowments, which would enable them to strike out their 

 own line unhampered by the purely educational aims of 

 the colleges ; but State aid dries up the streams of private 

 liberality, and brings with it the cramping atmosphere of 

 official supervision. W. T. Thiselton-Dver. 



WItcombe, September 17. 



Sir W. T. Thiselton-Dver agrees, at all events, that 

 the attitude of British statesmen towards science leaves 

 much to be desired. Statistics can, of course, be treated 

 in many different ways, but, despite the criticisms in the 

 above letter, the general conclusion of the article referred 

 to remains substantially cotrect. The data are avowedly 

 incomplete ; only those who have attempted to collate the 

 material scattered throughout Government publications 

 appreciate wholly the difficulty of the task. 



.Although Sir W. T. Thiselton-Dyer maintains that but 

 a small part of the grant to the U.S. Department of 

 Agriculture is devoted to scientific research, the facts of 

 the case seem to support the conclusions of the article. 

 For the fiscal year ending June 30, 1905, the expenditure 

 on Investigation work alone, exclusive of the salaries of 

 permanent officials, was at least 201,000!. The annual 

 report for 1905-6 of our Board of Agriculture and Fisheries 

 on the distribution of grants for agricultural education and 

 research shows that the grant for agricultural research 

 amounted to 3551. I Since " agriculture in the United 

 .States Is far from having reached its intensive stage," 

 there Is surely less need for grants in aid of agricultural 

 research there than in this country. 



Grants to colleges and universities were omitted inten- 

 tionally — and special attention was directed to the omission 

 — since this subject has been dealt with so often in 

 Nature ; consequently, the administration by the Board of 

 .Agriculture of the Treasury grant for the purposes of 

 agricultural education, much of the work of the Irish 

 Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, the 

 activities of the Royal Colleges of Science In London and 

 Dublin, and the university colleges, fell outside the scope 

 of the article. Had the subject of grants for higher educa- 

 tional purposes been under consideration, an equally gre.it 

 disparity between the amount provided from public funds 

 In the United States and in this country would have been 



NO. 1979, VOL. 76] 



