Febeuabt 10, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



217 



time to use your leisure to do original work. 

 The next five years will settle what your sci- 

 entific standing will be. See that you make 

 good. I can not get for you an increase of 

 salary, but I can get for you every facility 

 for good work." I thought I had my man, 

 but he came to me a couple days later saying 

 he had decided to go, as his wife thought she 

 could not live on $1,500 a year. As a second 

 case I take that of a young man in another 

 institution in whose work I became interested. 

 When a book of his appeared, I wrote him that 

 I was sorry he printed it. It did not fulfil 

 the expectations I had of him, and I believed 

 no man could afford to be the author of a 

 useless book. He replied that he was glad 

 others were not of my opinion and sent with 

 the letter several laudatory clippings from 

 papers and eulogistic letters from professors 

 with reputation. This, of course, was a great 

 victory and in a way I admit he was right; 

 for the book brought him a call to a leading 

 university. But a book of promise is yet to 

 come. This, not starvation, is the road to 

 ruin. Young men are not spoiled as fellows, 

 but as assistant professors. A call means new 

 responsibilities, the breaking up of old habits 

 and a loss of self-discipline. The new presi- 

 dent calls him a second Agassiz; the univer- 

 sity press bureau spreads laudatory notices of 

 him in the local press and the alumni take a 

 hand in extension of the fame of the new 

 genius. 



Dr. Jordan tells us that he has been work- 

 ing for others the greater part of his life and 

 that he is disappointed in the results. But 

 for whom has he been working — ^for fellows or 

 for assistant professors? There are no fel- 

 lowships at Stanford University. If he would 

 go over his cases, he would, in my opinion, 

 find that he, like other college presidents, has 

 been dragging into the lime light young men 

 that it would have been better to have let 

 alone. Each university should build up its 

 faculty quietly from its fellows instead of 

 running press bureaus to laud immature men. 

 Scholars are not born, they are made by their 

 environment. 



No one is worth keeping who will not halt 



long enough on $1,500 a year to do good work. 

 The assistant professorship is an unearned 

 entrance to the halls of learning. If faculties 

 would agree that no one should have the title 

 of professor until it was fuUy earned, the in- 

 crease of true learning would be possible. 

 Scholarship is made by hard work, and comes 

 only with gray hairs. If a man is wanted 

 from another university take its best. Young 

 men should be left alone until they are fully 

 developed before transplanting them. 



S. N. Patten 

 Univeesity or Pennstlvania 



To THE Editor of Science : In response to a 

 recent friendly note from Dr. Edmund B. 

 Wilson let me say: No money could be better 

 spent than that used for the fellowship which 

 enabled Wilson to walk and work with Brooks 

 and Martin and Remsen. But too much such 

 money is used to hire mediocrity to make dia- 

 grams for pedantry. 



Our scholars must in some degree be de- 

 scended from scholars. Relatively few of our 

 teachers have the personality which befits the 

 leader in an intellectual school. The scholar 

 should be free to seek such leadership, and our 

 present fellowship machinery tends, on the 

 whole, to confuse rather than to help. 



David Stare Jordan 



^ the ARIZONA PASSENGER PIGEONS 



The passenger pigeon is now generally be- 

 lieved to be extinct in a wild state, and of 

 those formerly living in confinement only a 

 single survivor, in the Zoological Garden at 

 Cincinnati, remains. Under these circum- 

 stances reminiscences of its past history nat- 

 urally find place in ornithological and other 

 journals, based on the recollections of ob- 

 servers still living or gleaned from the pub- 

 lished narratives of early travelers and ex- 

 plorers of the birds' former range, some fifty 

 pages of such matter having appeared in the 

 last two numbers of The Auh alone. Among 

 recent contributions to passenger pigeon lore 

 is Dr. McGee's " Notes on the Passenger 

 Pigeon," published in a recent number of 

 Science.' 



'Vol. XXXII., pp. 958-964, December 30, 1910. 



