July 26, 1912] 



SCIENCE 



111 



our national wealth and -with the progress of 

 higher education in our own country. It is 

 during the last fifty years that American uni- 

 versities have begun to provide adequate 

 facilities for higher education of the American 

 youth. Museum building suffered a notable 

 decline during the eighties. This was a pe- 

 riod of active industrial development and of 

 immigration into the Great Plains and to the 

 west. To the writer the rapidly rising series 

 of figures in the first table suggests the initial 

 rapid growth of a great and strong nation in 

 its infancy. Individual growth is most rapid 

 at first. 



ing of living truths in the human intellect by 

 the collection and care of what the average 

 hard-headed business man would scorn as 

 " dry bones." 



Table III. and the map indicate roughly the 

 geographic distribution and the course of 

 westward travel of the scientific mind of our 

 nation. It has blazed a trail from Boston via 

 New York and Philadelphia, to San Prancisco. 

 They show also the lingering effects of the 

 world's most cruel war. Museums are the 

 creations of intellect and wealth. Our great 

 civil war destroyed the wealth of the south. 

 Hence the insignificant sum spent for mu- 



The irregularities in the series show that 

 it does not represent the activities of any 

 great number of individuals. The series is 

 clearly an expression of a few potent factors, 

 psychic, inscrutable forces, acting through the 

 medium of exceptional men. And it is well 

 known that the average man, the average man 

 of wealth included, is not a prophet. It re- 

 quires a prophet's instincts and faith to make 

 enormous investments looking to the awaken- 



seums in the south. A large vacant area 

 appears in the southwest. The straight lines 

 on the map, radiating from a point in the 

 south part of this space, show the shortest 

 distances to the nearest museums, where a 

 naturalist in this region can take his collec- 

 tion for study. The indices at the proximal 

 ends of these lines point to a place where the 

 great museum of the southwest should be 

 reared, a modern temple of science on the 



