554 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXIV. No. 618. 



on the advantages of isolation may not be out 

 of order. 



I have read with amazement about the in- 

 nocuous desuetude into w^hich the Smithsonian 

 Institution is said to have fallen, of its crime 

 of accumulating collections, the lament that 



A national museum has been developed, a new 

 four million-dollar building is now going up for 

 the same; a zoological garden and an astrophys- 

 ical observatory have been established; finally 

 costly experiments on flying machines have been 

 provided for by congress, all under the manage- 

 ment of the secretary of the Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion, who is not an officer of the nation, but 

 elected as executive officer of the Smithson Trust, 

 and paid exclusively from the Smithson fund. 



These are, indeed, all serious crimes that are 

 charged to the Smithsonian, and I am afraid 

 that a close search would reveal others, *. e., 

 the organization of the IT. S. Fisheries Bureau 

 and the Bureau of Ethnology — perhaps still 

 others. It was doubtless criminal for Langley 

 to experiment with useless flying machines, 

 and, if memory serves me, Henry was equally 

 criminally working with the useless telegraph. 

 Still some of these misdemeanors on the part 

 of the Smithsonian officials seem to have their 

 mitigating circumstances. 



Every one ought to know, but, apparently, 

 every one does not, that the truly national 

 institutions of the National Museum, the 

 Eisheries and Ethnological Bureaus, the Geo- 

 logical Survey, have provided the very oppor- 

 tunities for temporary or permanent research 

 on the part of paid investigating curators and 

 of visiting college professors that some one 

 has asked should be provided. These provi- 

 sions may not be for ' our ' narrow little lines 

 of research, but they are for research. 



Divorce of the museum idea from the 

 Smithsonian, if this implies the abolition of 

 collections and discouragement of making col- 

 lections, means the abandonment in biology 

 at least of the fields of research that have in 

 the past been most fruitful in detailed results 

 and broad generalization. The plea seems 

 to me to be not so much for a broad national 

 institution as for the abolition of things that 

 are in favor of the narrow lines in which 

 * we ' are personally interested. 



Mr. Hinrichs in his youthful days evidently 

 looked upon Henry as a broad, great man, as 

 I in my youthful days looked upon Baird as 

 a broad, great man, and it comes as a great 

 shock to me to find that my youthful vision 

 was blurred and to read that Baird was only 

 a ' specialist in fishes ' and Langley a special- 

 ist in stars (and flying raachines?). How- 

 ever, we are always inclined to think of the 

 man clamoring for the shoes of some depart- 

 ing worthy as entirely too small in parts to fill 

 them, and the trees we climbed when we were 

 young were much larger than those that grow 

 nowadays. 



If we seriously ask ourselves whether the 

 Smithsonian has increased and diffused knowl- 

 edge among men, I think we must in sorrow 

 admit that indeed it has, and we must, per- 

 haps, even sneakingly honor the men who 

 ' worked ' the nation by starting various lines 

 of investigation and then eked out the slender 

 original means of the Smithsonian by gradu- 

 ally relegating these lines of research to inde- 

 pendent bureaus of research supported by the 

 nation. Perhaps, as an immigrant I shall not 

 give too great offense by pleading guilty to 

 some little patriotic pride in the collection of 

 bureaus or departments which certainly form 

 a great national institution of research. 



The fact that the work in botany, in fishes, 

 in geographical distribution, in geology and 

 geography is done in departments independent 

 of each other ought not to worry a college man, 

 and the fact that the Smithsonian has hounded 

 the departments to their work is not too great 

 a divergence from the aims of Smithson. 



The discussion concerning the Smithsonian 

 is a mere trailer to the discussion of the Car- 

 negie Institution to which we treated ourselves 

 some time ago. In our disappointment that 

 the means of the Carnegie Institution are not 

 sufficient to enable us to do all that its estab- 

 lishment caused us to hope for, we turn on the 

 Smithsonian and urge that it must be re- 

 formed and, with its much slenderer means, 

 do what the Carnegie Institution found can 

 not be done. 



It is possible that the time has come to 

 modify the methods used for 'the increase 



