December 15, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



775 



jects of discussion in the faculty and its 

 nunrerous committees ; and these discussions 

 take time and tax vitality. On many pro- 

 fessors who are by nature attractive and 

 sympathetic the students make exhausting 

 demands for counsel and encouragement. 

 The prosperous and progressive American 

 institutions are all alike in expecting ser- 

 Tices of this nature from professors and 

 other teachers, both old and young; so 

 that the despatch of some administrative 

 duties is a common part of the function of 

 ^n American professor. 



Another call often made on the American 

 teacher is to create or care for collections, 

 ^nd to conduct the business of laboratories. 

 These business-like functions are not un- 

 welcome to professors who are fit for them. 

 Indeed, some professors like these func- 

 tions better than any others, and make 

 themselves more useful in these directions 

 than they could in any other ; but, welcome 

 or unwelcome, they fall to the lot of a large 

 proportion of the higher teachers of a uni- 

 versity, and take their time away not only 

 from teaching but from research. To the 

 creation and care of collections some of the 

 most eminent American scientists gave a 

 large proportion of their time, as, for ex- 

 ample, Asa Gray, the botanist, and Louis 

 Agassiz, the zoologist, at Harvard; James 

 T. Dana, the geologist, and 0. C. Marsh, 

 the paleontologist, at Yale ; James Hall, the 

 geologist, at Albany; and Joseph Henry, 

 the physicist, who was for thirty-two years 

 secretary of the Smithsonian Institution at 

 Washington. Innumerable lesser men have 

 devoted to administrative work, or to 

 libraries, collections and laboratories very 

 significant portions of their total working 

 time. 



The governing bodies of American uni- 

 versities being generally composed of men 

 not themselves experts in any of the univer- 

 sity activities, the real direction of those 

 activities devolves on the professors and 



other teachers ; and there is no avoiding this 

 delegation of power. For an American 

 professor, or an American faculty as a 

 whole, such questions as these are always 

 open — how much administrative work shall 

 fall to a professor ? to what extent may ad- 

 ministrative work, including museum work, 

 be safely entrusted to special officials who 

 are not teachers, but devote themselves 

 almost exclusively to administration? and 

 to what extent should scientific investiga- 

 tion and literary productiveness be made 

 the function of men separated from the 

 large class of university teachers, and ex- 

 pected to devote themselves to original re- 

 search? Thus far, the expectation of all 

 the American colleges and universities has 

 been to combine these three functions — 

 teaching, administration and research — or 

 at least two of them, in the single person 

 of the professor; and to-day this remains 

 the commonest expectation, especially in 

 the sciences, both pure and applied. Of 

 late years the demand for men as professors 

 who are capable of original research has 

 been rising; that is, in selecting professors 

 more account has lately been taken of 

 proved capacity in this direction than used 

 to be ; but still there are very few positions 

 in the United States where the prosecution 

 of scientific investigation is made the chief 

 business of a professor. In the thought of 

 American college trustees, research and 

 literary production are not separate func- 

 tions, but accompaniments of teaching, to 

 be maintained all the time, like bodily ex- 

 ercise, in connection with other stated oc- 

 cupations. The Germans have done more 

 than any other people to create positions for 

 investigators; and they have invented and 

 put into force certain regulations for such 

 positions which tend to secure the contin- 

 uous activity of their incumbents. These 

 regulations prescribe a moderate amount of 

 public teaching by lectures or periodical re- 

 ports, and the instruction and training of 



