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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. 980 



the adjective fungous may have been intended, 

 with the accidentally omitted. Or could it 

 he that the much abused word fungoid would 

 have met the author's requirement? The use 

 of words from the sciences demands caution 

 from the general writer, but in a scientific 

 journal there should be no lapse, certainly 

 none from the pen of a critic. The word 

 fungus with its derivatives is too often mis- 

 used. J. C. Arthur 

 Purdue University, 

 Lafayette, Ind. 



QUOTATIONS 



THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY FROM TWO POINTS OF 

 VIEW 



The finest thing which civilization has yet 

 produced is a great American university upon 

 a private foundation. A company of gentle- 

 men associate themselves and assume the 

 obligation of providing the means for, and 

 the organization of, an institution for the 

 highest culture, not only without any pecu- 

 niary compensation to themselves, but giving 

 freely of their time, effort and substance, and 

 securing, in their aid, the countenance and 

 contributions of their friends and fellow citi- 

 zens, and a body of scholars, selected by this 

 original association, who, sacrificing at the 

 outset the prospect of worldly gain, devote 

 themselves zealously and enthusiastically to 

 the discovery of truth and its dissemination 

 and to the making of character — such, in 

 brief outline, is this great product of human 

 evolution. No other nation on the earth has 

 brought the like of it forth. It is the pe- 

 culiar offspring of American conscience and 

 American liberty. To have had an honorable 

 part in the creation of such an institution is 

 a privilege of the highest order and obligates 

 the happy participant to render to his fellow- 

 men an account of his experiences. — Dean 

 John W. Burgess in the Columhia University 

 Quarterly for September. 



In America there are three sexes — men, 

 women and professors. It is the saying of 

 European scholars looking from those self- 

 governing democracies, their universities, 



upon ours. They see ours ruled without the 

 consent of the governed through presidential 

 autocrats by boards of non-scholar trustees — 

 not a part of the world of learning, but super- 

 imposed upon it. The American professor 

 has the status of an employee subject to dis- 

 missal without trial by men not his col- 

 leagues. 



The universities of Germany, the older uni- 

 versities of England and Scotland respect and 

 trust and leave free the individual. Their or- 

 ganization gives them the right to regard 

 themselves as provinces of the republic of let- 

 ters. The overlorded universities of America 

 have no such right. 



For a couple of centuries American pro- 

 fessors have submitted to a system which 

 gives most of them little control over their 

 own lives, small power to defend any truth 

 which has powerful enemies, no part in shap- 

 ing the policies of the institutions in which 

 they teach. Hence the pitiable figure of the 

 American scholar to whom Emerson, Emer- 

 sonically oblivious of such little matters as 

 despotic college government, held up a high 

 ideal of independent manhood. 



The position of her scholars under the 

 thumb of business men and capitalists who 

 control the university purse is enough to ac- 

 count for the fact that America is intellec- 

 tually second rate. Unless content to remain 

 so Americans have got to think down to bed- 

 rock about university government and do 

 what thought demands. 



Feeling that something is wrong, we have 

 begun to examine the life of our universities, 

 but no general attention has centered as yet 

 upon their inherited, undemocratic system of 

 control which is bearing the fruit of timidity 

 and subservience among those twenty-three 

 thousand men and five thousand women 

 whose social function is to create and trans- 

 mit American thought. — George Cram in the 

 Forum for October. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 

 Determination of Time, Longitude, Latitude 

 and Azimuth. Fifth Edition. By William 

 Bowie. Special Publication No. 14, U. S. 



