548 



SCIEJS'CE. 



LVoL. Vill., No. 201 



emploj' good men to prepare the plans and to 

 do the work, this in itself is a very good reason for 

 giving him the duty of such selection and employ- 

 ment. 



A third objection is that when an officer of the 

 army or navy is detailed for scientific or other 

 special work, the interests of this work and of the 

 public are too often made subordinate to the inter- 

 ests of the naval or military service, more espe- 

 cially in the matter of change of station. For ex- 

 ample, civil engineers object to the policy of 

 placing river and harbor improvements in the 

 hands of army engineers, because one of the ob- 

 jects kejat in view by the war department in mak- 

 ing details for this purpose is to vary the duty of 

 the individual officer from time to time so as to 

 give him a wider experience. Hence it may hap- 

 pen that an officer placed on duty in connection 

 with the improvement of certain harbors on the 

 Great Lakes shall, after three or four years, and 

 just as he has gained sufficient experience of the 

 peculiarities of lake work to make his supervision 

 there peculiarly valuable, be transferred to work 

 on the imi^rovement of the Lower Mississippi, with 

 which he may be quite unfamiliar. 



In like manner Professor Clarke objects to hav- 

 ing a laboratory connected with the medical de- 

 partment of the navy on the ground that the offi- 

 cer in charge is changed every three years ; con- 

 sequently science suffers in order that naval 

 routine may be preserved. 



There is force in this class of objections, but 

 the moral I should draw from them is, not that 

 army and navy officers should not be allowed to 

 do woi'k outside their own departments or in 

 science, but that when ihey are put upon such 

 duty, the ordinary routine of change of station 

 every three or four years should not be enforced 

 upon them without careful consideration of the 

 circumstances of the case, and satisfactory 

 evidence that the work on which they are en- 

 gaged will not suffer by the change. And, as 

 a matter of fact, I believe this has been the 

 policy piusued, and instances could be given 

 where an officer has been kept twenty years at 

 one station for this very reason. 



I pass over a number of objections that I have 

 heard made to the employment of army and navy 

 officers as administrators, on the ground that they 

 are too ' bumptious,' or ' domineering,' or ' supercil- 

 ious,' or ' finicky,' because every one knows what 

 these mean and their force. An army officer is 

 not necessarily a polished gentleman ; neither is 

 a civilian ; and a good organizer and adminis- 

 trator, whether officer or civilian, will at times, 

 and especially to some people, appear arbitrary and 

 dictatorial. 



There is another objection to special details of 

 army or navy officers for scientific duties which 

 comes not so much from outside persons as from 

 the war department and the officers themselves, 

 and it is this : among such officers there are al- 

 ways a certain number who not only prefer 

 special details to routine duty, but who actively 

 seek for such details, who are perpetual candidates 

 for them. 



The proportion of men whose ideas as to their 

 own scientific acquirements, merits, and claims 

 to attention, are excessive as compared with the 

 ideas of their acquaintances on the same points, is 

 not greater in the army than elsewhere ; but when 

 an army officer is afflicted in this way, the attack 

 is sometimes very severe, and the so-caUed in- 

 fluence which he brings to bear may cause a good 

 deal of annoyance to the department, even if it be 

 not sufficient to obtain his ends. I have heard 

 officers of high rank, in a fit of impatience under 

 such circumsiances, express a most hearty and 

 emphatic wish that no special details were possi- 

 ble, so that lobbying for them should be useless. 

 This, however, seems to me to be too heroic a 

 remedy for the disease, wdiich, after all. only pro- 

 duces comparatively trifling irritation and dis- 

 comfort. 



The same evil exists, to a much greater extent, 

 in the civil branches of the government. Few 

 persons can fully appreciate the loss of time, the 

 worry, and the annoyance to which the responsi- 

 ble heads of some of our bureaus for scientific 

 work are subjected through the desire of people 

 for ofScial position and for maintenance by the 

 government. They have to stand always at the 

 bat and protect their wickets from the balls which 

 are bowled at them in every direction, even from 

 behind by some of their own subordinates. 



It is true that a great majority of the balls go 

 wide and cause little trouble, and a majority of 

 the bowlers soon get tired and leave the field ; but 

 there are generally a few persistent ones who 

 gradually acquire no small degree of skill in dis- 

 covering the weak or unguarded points, and suc- 

 ceed in making things lively for a time. Con- 

 sidered from the point of view of the public 

 interests, such men are useful, for although they 

 cause some loss of valuable time, and occasionally 

 do a little damage by promoting hostile legislation, 

 yet their criticisms are often worth taking into 

 account ; they tend to prevent the machine from 

 getting into a rut, and they promote activity and 

 attention to business on the part of administrative 

 chiefs. It is a saying among dog-fanciers that a 

 few fleas on a dog are good for him rather than 

 otherwise, as they compel him to take some exer- 

 cise under any circumstances. 



