L PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
duty of the individual officer from time to time so as to give him a 
wider experience. Hence it may happen that an officer placed on 
duty in connection with the improvement of certain harbors on the 
Great Lakes shall, after three or four years, and just as he has gained 
sufficient experience of the peculiarities of lake work to make his 
supervision there peculiarly valuable, be transferred to work on the - 
improvement of the Lower Mississippi with which he may be quite 
unfamiliar. 
In like manner Professor Clarke objects to having a labora- 
tory connected with the medical department of the Navy on the 
ground that the officer in charge is changed every three years; 
consequently science suffers in order that naval routine may be pre- 
served. 
There is force in this class of objections, but the moral I should 
draw from them is, not that Army and Navy officers should not be 
allowed to do work outside their own departments or in science, 
but that when they are put upon such duty, the ordinary routine of 
change of station every three or four years should not be enforced 
upon them without careful consideration of the circumstances of the 
case, and satisfactory evidence that the work on which they are en- 
gaged will not suffer by the change. And, as a matter of fact, I 
believe this has been the policy pursued, and instances could be given 
where an officer has been kept twenty years at one station for this 
very reason. 
I pass over a number of objections that I have heard made to the 
employment of Army and Navy officers as administrators, on the 
ground that they are too “ bumptious,” or “domineering,” or “super- 
cilious,” or “finicky,” because every one knows what these mean and 
their force. An Army officer is not necessarily a polished gentleman ; 
neither is a civilian; and a good organizer and administrator, 
whether officer or civilian, will at times, and especially to some 
people, appear arbitrary and dictatorial. 
There is another objection to special details of Army or Navy 
officers for scientific duties which comes not so much from outside 
persons as from the War Department and the officers themselves, 
and it is this: Among such officers there are always a certain num- 
ber who not only prefer special details to routine duty, but who 
actively seek for such details, who are perpetual»eandidates for 
them. 
The proportion of men whose ideas as to their own scientific ac- 
