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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIX. No. 1008 



deaths or voluntary removals. No altera- 

 tion should be made in the salaries or the 

 essentials of the organization except by 

 unanimous vote of the administration. 

 The institution should be conservative, so 

 that there might be no occasion for troubles 

 and so that there might be ample time to 

 test the ideal of the laboratory. 



The institution should have the power 

 to confer a special honorary degree on any 

 man of the institute or elsewhere for pre- 

 eminently noteworthy work in physics. 

 This degree should bear no relation to the 

 period of service of the candidate. This 

 would aid in giving the institute a rightful 

 leadership in scholarship. 



An American institute for physics with 

 the ideal for scholarship alone, should be 

 fostered by private endowment, by a gov- 

 ernmental bureau or by a national univer- 

 sity, but hardly by any university such as 

 exists already. A private endowment 

 would be preferable from all points of view 

 save perhaps one, providing of course that 

 no strings were tied to the endowment in- 

 consistent with the ideals of the institution. 

 A privately endowed institution might not 

 tie itself up with our nation and our exist- 

 ing educational institutions as fast as if it 

 were otherwise fostered. And yet the suc- 

 cess of the Rockefeller Institute for Med- 

 ical Research would tend to dispel this no- 

 tion. The capitalization need not be beyond 

 a private endowment, for the income could 

 be less than that spent by many industrial 

 concerns on research, but of course more 

 than spent by most univei-sities for re- 

 search. 



A governmental bureau might foster 

 such a project if it could only have a char- 

 ter that would insure it a semi-permanent 

 freedom from disturbances arising from 

 the petty rules prevailing generally in our 

 governmental bureaus. Such an action by 

 our government would create a tremen- 



dous sentiment in favor of scholarship 

 throughout our democracy. It is not un- 

 reasonable to expect that national support 

 of scholarship would create a national 

 spirit somewhat like that in Germany, for 

 it is well known that the government there 

 has long fostered scholarship and that Ger- 

 man industrial supremacy has come as a 

 result of supremacy in productive scholar- 

 ship. According to Professor Mann, Ger- 

 many has established a separate lot of 

 schools to take care of the technical educa- 

 tion which our state universities feel called 

 u^pon to provide for. 



The government might cooperate in a 

 physical institute somewhat on the basis of 

 the work done by the Carnegie Institution. 

 Already this institution serves purposes 

 closely akin to those of the proposed phys- 

 ical institute, particularly in geo-physics 

 and in terrestrial magnetism, and yet there 

 are obvious distinctions. 



A national university might foster a 

 physical institute properly, but there are 

 grave doubts. It is not clear how such a 

 university could be founded on federal 

 support without the injurious meddling of 

 the demagogue, who can not recognize any 

 good to society that is not certain to ex- 

 tend to the masses in the present or near 

 future generations. The attitude of Wil- 

 let M. Hays, for example, who holds that a 

 national university should reach ninety 

 per cent, of the people in the present gen- 

 eration, may be all right for a technical 

 school or high school, but this attitude 

 should be regarded as positively vicious 

 when applied to a national university. As 

 the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture 

 points out, already applied science is de- 

 veloping much faster than pure science. 

 My opinion is that this only emphasizes 

 our great need for institutions that shall 

 develop leaders and prophets. Such an in- 

 stitution could, if properly chartered, in- 



