October 24, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



645 



on-go of paid science, strangles local sci- 

 entific research unborn. 



And if the keenest, brightest, most gifted 

 of the young people reject the scientific 

 career, then fellowships serve only a diill, 

 stale, tired clique of incompetents. 



Even after the possession of the rare and 

 precious gift of scientific genius has been 

 clearly, competitively proven, the possessor 

 may choose what he considers a safer, more 

 paying, more attractive career. I was 

 twice Fellow of the Johns Hopkins Uni- 

 versity and among my contemporaries two, 

 unsurpassed in gifts for scientific crea- 

 tivity, deliberately went over to money- 

 making. 



And finally among the sifted few who 

 have the divine gift and the divine appre- 

 ciation of their gift, the exquisite bud in 

 its tender incipiency may be cruelly 

 frosted. 



Of the great Hilbert's 'betweenness' as- 

 sumptions one was this year proved re- 

 dundant by a young man under twenty 

 working with me here, and by a demonstra- 

 tion so extraordinarily elegant and unex- 

 pected that letters from high authorities 

 came congratulating the university on the 

 achievement. Professor E. H. Moore, 

 of the University of Chicago, has published 

 his congratulatory letter spontaneously 

 written {Amer. Math. Monthly, June-July, 

 1902, pp. 152, 153). 



This young man of marvellous genius, 

 of richest promise, I recommended for 

 continuance in the department he adorned. 

 He was displaced in favor of a local school- 

 marm. Then I raised the money necessary 

 to pay him, only five hundred dollars, and 

 offered it to the President here. He 

 would not accept it. 



The Carnegie Institution is bound, I 

 think, in order to promote most manifoldly 

 scientific productivity, to consider such 

 prenatal influences molding, making or un- 

 making the potential man of science. 



As a practical application of such line 

 of thought, this would favor the Woods 

 Hole laboratory retaining its independent 

 position and popular organization. 



Men of science should never voluntarily 

 take away from men of science the highest 

 and finally responsible direction of scien- 

 tific productivity. 



The bane of the state university is that 

 its regents are the appointees of a poli- 

 tician. 



If he were even limited by the rule that 

 half of them must be academic graduates, 

 there would be some safety against the 

 prostitution of a university, the broadest 

 of human institutions, to polities and sec- 

 tionalism, the meanest provincialism. 



Just so scientific journals should be 

 absolutely controlled by scientific men, in- 

 dependently or in connection with scien- 

 tific societies. 



So the purchase by the Carnegie Institu- 

 tion of the American Journal of Morphol- 

 ogy would appear ill-advised. The para- 

 mount aim should be to help, not to 

 dominate. 



Everything in a completely subsidized 

 journal is taken at a discount. Judicious, 

 delicate, sympathetic help for every de- 

 veloping scientific mind, for every wise 

 scientific enterprise, should be the watch- 

 word. 



Science is remodelling the life and 

 thought of the world. Mere acquirement 

 must give place to active production. 



The spring is spontaneity. With this 

 the Carnegie Institution must never inter- 

 fere. Original work has ever been largely 

 connected with teaching. 



We have reached the position that, to be 

 of the highest quality, teaching must come 

 from a creator. What of the inverse? 

 Is teaching a benefit to productivity 1 This 

 is a vital question for the Carnegie Insti- 

 tution. 



