OCTOBEE 3, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



541 



usefulness of liis money. His trustees 

 form a permanent body external to the 

 universities, which, while possessing no 

 power of direct control, must always, as 

 holder of the purse-string-s, be in a posi- 

 tion to offer independent and weighty crit- 

 icisms. More recently Dr. Carnegie has 

 devoted an equal sum of ten million dollars 

 to the foundation of a Carnegie Institu- 

 tion in Washington. Here again he has 

 been guided by the same ideas. He has 

 neither founded a university nor handed 

 over the money to any existing university. 

 He has created a permanent trust charged 

 with the duty of watching educational ef- 

 forts and helping them from the outside 

 according to the best judgment that can 

 be formed in the circumstances of the 

 moment. Its aims are to be — to promote 

 original research; to discover the excep- 

 tional man in every department of study, 

 whether inside or outside of the schools, 

 and to enable him to make his special 

 study his life-work; to increase facilities 

 for higher education ; to aid and stimulate 

 the universities and other educational 

 institutions; to assist students who may 

 prefer to study at Washington; and 

 to ensure prompt publication of sci- 

 entific discoveries. The general purpose 

 of the founder is to secure, if possible, for 

 the United States leadership in the domain 

 of discovery and the utilization of new 

 forces for the benefit of man. Nothing- 

 will more powerfully further this end than 

 attention to the injunction to lay hold of 

 the exceptional man whenever and wher- 

 ever he may be found, and, having got him, 

 to enable him to carry on the work for 

 which he seems specially designed. That 

 means, I imagine, a scouring of the old 

 world, as well as of the new, for the best 

 men in every department of study— in fact, 

 an assiduous collecting of brains similar 

 to the collecting of rare books and works 

 of art which Americans are now carrying 



on in so lavish a manner. As in diplomacy 

 and war, so in science, we owe our reputa- 

 tion, and no small part of our prosperity, 

 to exceptional men; and that we do not 

 enjoy these things in fuller measure we owe 

 to our lack of an army of well-trained 

 ordinary men capable of utilizing their 

 ideas. Our exceptional men have too often 

 worked in obscurity, without recognition 

 from a public too imperfectly instructed 

 to guess at their greatness, without as- 

 sistance from a State governed largely by 

 dialecticians, and without help from aca- 

 demic authorities hidebound by the pedan- 

 tries of medieval scholasticism. For such 

 men we have to wait upon the will of 

 Heaven. Even Dr. Carnegie will not 

 always find them when they ai-e wanted. 

 But what can be done in that direction will 

 be done by institutions like Dr. Carnegie's, 

 and for the benefit of the nation that po- 

 sesses them in greatest abundance and 

 uses them most intelligently. When con- 

 templating these splendid endowments of 

 learning, it occurred to me that it would 

 be interesting to find out exactly what 

 some definite quantity of scientific acliieve- 

 ment has cost in hard cash. In an article 

 by Carl Snyder in the January number of 

 the North American Review, entitled 

 'America's Inferior Place in the Scientific 

 World,' I found the statement that 'it 

 would be hardly too much to say that dur- 

 ing the hundred years of its existence the 

 Royal Institution alone has done more for 

 English science than all of the English 

 universities put together. This is cer- 

 tainly true with regard to British industry, 

 for it was here that the discoveries of Fara- 

 day were made.' I was emboldened by 

 this estimate from a distant and impartial 

 observer to do what otherwise I might have 

 shrunk from doing, and to take the Royal 

 Institution— after all, the foundation of 

 an American citizen. Count Rumford— as 

 the basis of my inquiry. The work done 



