14 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXIII. No. 575. 



resent the views of the majority of the 

 faculty at any given time. 



If in discussing the position of scientific 

 men in this country I have given greater 

 prominence to the conditions which tend to 

 retard progress than to those which favor 

 it, it is because I believe that the first step 

 toward the removal of obstacles is to state 

 clearly what those obstacles are. It is not 

 improbable that some evils will disappear as 

 soon as it is generally recognized that they 

 are evils. We have seen that the public 

 are more interested than they were in the 

 welfare of scientific men, and the better 

 they understand existing conditions, the 

 better for us. If they now believe that 

 organization and concentration are neces- 

 sary in science, as in business, they should 

 also understand that organization has its 

 dangers as well as its advantages. "While 

 accepting the prevailing idea of the neces- 

 sity of organization, we must, at the same 

 time, insist that the future of science re- 

 quires that a proper balance be maintained 

 between general organization and indi- 

 vidual independence. Furthermore, the 

 organization needed in science does not 

 consist in having scientific work placed 

 under the control of purely business men 

 but of scientific men who have a capacity 

 for administration, and such men can be 

 found. Purely financial matters must be 

 entrusted to , non-scientific business men, 

 but science itself is something different 

 from business in the ordinary sense. Even 

 when placed in charge of scientific men, it 

 is important to avoid carrying the organ- 

 ization of science so far as to repress indi- 

 vidual effort and bring about a sort of 

 bureaucracy which resents unfavorable 

 criticism and requires all work to conform 

 to a fixed narrow standard. Science should 

 be a republic in which, with the approval 

 of the majority of workers, the more ca- 

 pable become the, rulers. Science should be 



well organized, but it should never become, 

 in a purely business sense, a trust. 



W. G. Faklow. 

 Haevard University. 



THE PROBLEM OF THE METALLIFEROUS 

 VEINS.'' 



The rush of the gold-seekers to Cali- 

 fornia in 1849, and the quickly following 

 one to Australia in 1851, were notable mi- 

 grations in search of the yellow metal, but 

 they were not the first in the history of our 

 race. There is, indeed, no reason to sup- 

 pose that, in the past, mining excitements 

 were limited even to the historical period; 

 on the contrary, the legends of the golden 

 fleece, and of the golden apples of the 

 Hesperides, probably describe in poetic 

 garb two of the early expeditions, and long 

 before either we can- well imagine primitive 

 man hurrying to new diggings in order to 

 enlarge his scanty stock of metals. Among 

 the influences which have led to the ex- 

 ploration and settlement of new lands, the 

 desire to find and acquire gold and silver 

 has been one ,of the most important, and as 

 a means of introducing thousands of vigor- 

 ous settlers, of their own volition, into un- 

 inhabited or uncivilized regions there is no 

 agent which compares with it. In this con- 

 nection it may be also remarked that there 

 is no more interesting chapter in the history 

 of civilization, than that which concerns it- 

 self with the use of the metals and with the 

 development of methods for their extrac- 

 tion from their ores. Primitive man was 

 naturally limited to those which he found 

 in the native state. They are but few, 

 viz., gold in wide but sparse distribution in 

 ■gravels; copper in occasional masses along 

 the outcrops of veins, in which far the 

 greater part of the metal is combined with 

 oxygen or sulphur, copper again, in porous 

 rocks, as in the altogether exceptional case 



' Presidential address before the New York 

 Academy of Sciences, December 18, 1905. 



