October 3, 1902.J 



SCIENCE. 



523 



dertakes work on a commercial basis but 

 without profit and with a yearly subven- 

 tion of one or two hundred thousand dol- 

 lars would bring down the costs of publica- 

 tion to the moderate expenses usual in 

 Germany. If no text-books, but merely 

 monographs, were printed there, an immense 

 gain for the productive scholarship of the 

 whole country might be expected. Large 

 prizes for the solution of certain problems 

 might be another, probably less helpful, 

 scheme which would stimulate all alike 

 without undertaking to support special in- 

 stitutions. 



But, as I said, the life in the periphery 

 works essentially as inhibition for central 

 activity; it is the second characteristic 

 feature, the system of smallest differences, 

 the sliding scale of the institutions, which 

 offers positive chances. In Germany where 

 definite types are separated by sharp lines 

 no new development is probable ; in Ameri- 

 ca, where the strength has always lain in the 

 possibility of steady progress to higher and 

 higher forms, the same energies must lead 

 beyond the present state. Just as the prin- 

 ciple of the sliding scale allowed the gradu- 

 ate school of to-day to grow out of the col- 

 lege of yesterday, we may expect that a 

 higher form, an overgraduate school of to- 

 morrow, will grow from the forms of to-day. 

 And here is the place where the Carnegie 

 Institution might hasten progress. Not a 

 national university which should be in com- 

 petition with the existing universities, but 

 a higher type standing above all universi- 

 ties, and which, just like the graduate 

 schools twenty years ago, might begin very 

 modestly but might grow in some decades 

 to a great national institution. 



The students, or better, fellows, of this 

 school would be young men beyond the 

 doctor examination, young college inlstruet- 

 ors, men who wish to live some time in the 

 atmosphere of pure research. The teachers 

 would be the masters of the craft, the lead- 



ing scholars of the country, men of undis- 

 puted energy and of original thought. The 

 beginning might be small indeed: all our 

 universities would be greater if half of the 

 professors were left out. In our overuni- 

 versity a few great men without any doubt- 

 ful second class would do, say, fifteen men 

 with a salary of ten thousand dollars each. 

 They would have to come all either for life 

 or for one year ; if the one-year system were 

 chosen, they would remain in their own 

 universities and go to Washington on leave 

 of absence. Of course the establishment of 

 such a highest honor in the profession 

 would make necessary some measure of 

 self-government, and herein the institution 

 might become a model for the universities 

 in which the autocratism of the trustees is 

 clearly a relic of the college period but 

 quite unsuited to a university. The Ger- 

 man system is much more democratic ; 

 scholars choose the scholars, and this au- 

 tonomic feature belongs to the research- 

 making character of the German institu- 

 tion. The faculty chooses three, of whom 

 the government elects one. In a similar way 

 for instance the physics professors of the 

 thirty largest institutions might propose a 

 candidate for the physics chair, and the 

 trustees of the institution be bound to ap- 

 point one of the three who received the 

 three largest votes. There might be fifty 

 fellowships of one thousand dollars to be 

 distributed by the universities. 



All this would demand two hundred 

 thousand dollars, and the same sum for labo- 

 ratory equipments after spending the whole 

 income of -the first year for a building. 

 But while of course first-class research labo- 

 ratories in physics, chemistry, biology, psy- 

 chology, are essential, I venture even here 

 in the columns of Science the heresy that 

 the scientific experimental work of such 

 highest institution would not be so impor- 

 tant as the synthetic thought which is the 

 one need in our age of scattered specialized 



