ADDRESS. 13 



has devoted an equal sum of ten million dollars to the foundation of a 

 Carnegie Institution in "Washington. Here again he has been guided by 

 the same ideas. He has neither founded a university nor handed over 

 the money to any existing university. He has created a permanent trust 

 charged with the duty of watching educational efforts and helping them 

 from the outside according to the best judgment that can be formed in 

 the circumstances of the moment. Its aims are to be— to promote original 

 research ; to discover the exceptional man in every department of study, 

 whether inside or outside of the schools, and to enable him to make his 

 special study his life-work ; to increase facilities for higher education ; to 

 aid and stimulate the universities and other educational institutions ; to 

 assist students who may prefer to study at Washington ; and to ensure 

 prompt publication of scientific discoveries. The general purpose of the 

 founder is to secure, if possible, for the United States leadership in the 

 domain of discovery and the utilisation of new forces for the benefit of 

 man. Nothing will more powerfully further this end than attention to 

 the injunction to lay hold of the exceptional man whenever and wherever 

 he may be found, and, having got him, to enable him to carry on the work 

 for which he seems specially designed. That means, I imagine, a scouring 

 of the old world, as well as of the new, for the best men in every depart- 

 ment of study— in fact, an assiduous collecting of brains similar to the col- 

 lecting of rare books and works of art which Americans are now carrying 

 on in so lavish a manner. As in diplomacy and war, so in science, we owe 

 our reputation, and no small part of our prosperity, to exceptional men ; 

 and that we do not enjoy these things in fuller measure we owe to our 

 lack of an army of well-trained ordinary men capable of utilising their 

 ideas. Our exceptional men have too often worked in obscurity, without 

 recognition from a public too imperfectly instructed to guess at their 

 greatness, without assistance from a State governed largely by dialec- 

 ticians, and without help from academic authorities hidebound by the 

 pedantries of medieval scholasticism. For such men we have to wait upon 

 the will of Heaven. Even Dr. Carnegie will not always find them when 

 they are wanted. . But what can be done in that direction will be done 

 by institutions like Dr. Carnegie's, and for the benefit of the nation that 

 possesses them in greatest abundance and uses them most intelligently. 

 When contemplating these splendid endowments of learning, it occurred 

 to me that it would be interesting to find out exactly what some definite 

 quantity of scientific achievement has cost in hard cash. In an article 

 by Carl Snyder in the January number of the ' North American Review,' 

 entitled ' America's Inferior Place in the Scientific World,' I found the 

 statement that 'it would be hardly too much to say that during 

 the hundred years of its existence the Royal Institution alone has 

 done more for English science than all of the English universities put 

 together. This is certainly true with regard to British industry, for it 

 was here that the discoveries of Faraday were made.' I was emboldened by 

 this estimate from a distant and impartial observer to do, what otherwise 



