December 21, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



825 



and Thursday evenings, between 7:30 and 9 

 o'clock from Mr. Benjamin R. Andrews, Room 

 111, Teachers College. 



PROFESSOR OSBORN AND THE SECRETARY- 

 SHIP OF THE SMITHSONIAN 

 INSTITUTION. 



Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn has 

 declined the secretaryship of the Smithsonian 

 iHstitution, to which he was elected by the 

 regents on December 4. His letter to Hon. 

 Melville W. Fuller, chancelor of the Smith- 

 sonian Institution, dated New York, Decem- 

 ber 11, contains a full statement of all the 

 reasons which, aft«r reconsideration, finally 

 render Professor Osborn unable to accept the 

 post of secretary. Chief among these reasons 

 is the fact that he is nearing the completion 

 of several monographs and books, the prose- 

 cution of which is dependent upon the collec- 

 tions which he has brought together in New 

 York and the staff of trained assistants who 

 are working with him. Among these works 

 especially is the ' History of the Tertiary or 

 Fossil Mammals of North America,' the 

 * Titanothere Monograph ' and the ' Sauropoda 

 Monograph ' for the United States Geological 

 Survey, which were begun by the late Pro- 

 fessor O. C. Marsh, a monograph on the 

 evolution of the horse in preparation for the 

 American Museum of Natural History series, 

 also a popular volume on the evolution of the 

 horse to be published by Columbia University, 

 in addition to a large number of minor or sup- 

 plementary papers and researches. The main 

 tenor of Professor Osborn's letter is shown in 

 the following abstract: 



I was absolutely taken by surprise and deeply 

 moved by your generous action in voting to elect 

 me to the most honorable post of Secretary of the 

 Smithsonian Institution. It is the greatest honor 

 I have received or expect to receive; yet after 

 several days which I have devoted almost ex- 

 clusively to reflection on this matter from every 

 standpoint, I find myself unable to accept your 

 invitation. 



I desire to explain to you fully why I have 

 reached this conclusion, and I trust I may be able 

 to convince you it is through no lack of the sense 

 of public duty which should inspire every Ameri- 

 can. I hope I may convince you also that accept- 



ance would involve a change of career just at a 

 time when I am trying to publish the results 

 of thirty years of research. These results would 

 have been partly or entirely in print at this time 

 had it not been that for the past sixteen years 

 I have been interrupted and drawn away by execu- 

 tive and administrative work of the very char- 

 acter which would be demanded of your new secre- 

 tary on a grander scale. Tlie possibility of 

 continuing and completing these researches and at 

 the same time serving the office as it should be 

 served is the point on which my attention has 

 been centered during the past few days. 



As to time for research, my friend Dr. Alex- 

 ander Graham Bell in the course of two confer- 

 ences has assured me that the Regents especially 

 desire an investigator as well as an administrator ; 

 in other words, that the secretary should continue 

 his scientific researches, whatever they may hap- 

 pen to be, and I have tried to convince myself that 

 even with my peculiar temperament I might be 

 able to withdraw from time to time to pursue 

 and complete these publications. On this point 

 I have chiefly reflected, reviewing my experience 

 here in far less responsible positions. Naturally 

 there is some strong pressure here against my 

 acceptance of the post; but to reach an impartial 

 conclusion I have listened chiefly to those who 

 desire to see me accept. In these conferences and 

 among the numerous letters of congratulation 

 which I have received from scientific workers in 

 all parts of the country, I have not found one to 

 hold out the hope or expectation that my scien- 

 tific researches will continue even as they have in 

 the past. I am myself convinced that even with 

 the assured cooperation of a very able staff", the 

 ideal development of the Smithsonian with all its 

 auxiliary institutions will require nothing less 

 than the entire time, thought, energy, and 

 strength of the secretary for four or five years to 

 come. The quiet days of Joseph Henry and even 

 of Spencer F. Baird in this country have passed. 

 The enormous growth of the country, the tele- 

 phone, the telegraph, the wireless, the great news- 

 paper, make the seclusion and quiet absolutely 

 essential for research increasingly difficult every 

 day. 



Failure in the post or anything short of com- 

 plete success would disappoint you and would 

 disappoint the public, who naturally cannot ap- 

 preciate the undisturbed conditions essential to 

 the prosecution of successful intellectual work. 

 Other men may be so constituted as to assume a 

 grand office like the secretaryship, with its splen- 

 did possibilities for the future, and not have it 



