46 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XX. No. 497. 



themselves, for the best young men of our 

 land must realize all too fully that effort 

 and ability sufficient to win high honor in 

 the professions, or in business affairs, will 

 avail but little if exerted within the college 

 walls, and that for many years they and 

 their families must live upon less than is 

 earned by railway conductors, or baggage 

 inspectors in the custom house. 



It is, indeed, an open question at the 

 present day whether the members of our 

 greatest faculties compare favorably in 

 judgment, or even in character, with lead- 

 ers in law, medicine or affairs. Too often 

 one feels that the narrowing influence pro- 

 duced by years of poverty has had its final 

 effect upon the minds of many of our best 

 scholars. Unless conditions be changed the 

 faculties of our universities must surely 

 deteriorate, and the cause of education will 

 suffer incomparably; and is now suffering 

 to a greater degree than even the intelligent 

 public realize. 



A certain lack of public respect for our 

 great scholars is another but closely related 

 factor that operates against the true inter- 

 ests of education. The names of Whitney, 

 Gray, Leidy and Peirce have an unfamiliar 

 sound to us in comparison with those of 

 Max Miiller, Sir Joseph Hooker, Sir Rich- 

 ard Owen and Sir George Airy, their for- 

 eign contemporaries of no greater worth. 



It is true that the hope of being able to 

 advance the good of the world should be a 

 sufficient incentive to our effort; but men 

 are not abstractions of philosophy, and 

 grievously underpaid and unhonored pro- 

 fessions will fail to enlist the interest of 

 our ablest youth. 



But to consider another phase of the 

 intellectual growth of our colleges; one of 

 the most recent as well as the most hopeful 

 is the development of pos1>graduate schools 

 by all of our leading universities. It is 

 here, and here only, that advanced and pro- 

 ductive scholarship appears among the stu- 



dent body. The love and ambition for re- 

 search is fostered here, and comparison 

 between our universities and those of Ger- 

 many can only be instituted with reference 

 to our post-graduate schools, for only in 

 this direction of progress do we approach 

 the German standard. 



Yet in 1902-03 the graduate students 

 were but 4.6 per cent, of our student body, 

 and if the graduate schools increase at the 

 rate at which they have developed since 1890, 

 more than a century must elapse before 

 one half of the students in our universities 

 will be in the graduate school. No great 

 progress can be expected until the colleges 

 can afford to appoint leaders of thought to 

 professorships, the duties of which shall 

 be confined to the graduate school. It, 

 seems, indeed, remarkable that this has not 

 been done, for we have long since recog- 

 nized that a primary condition of success- 

 ful management demands that special 

 faculties shall preside over the affairs of 

 our medical, law, technical and other 

 schools under the auspices of universities. 

 Why should our graduate schools be with- 

 out a special faculty? The work of the 

 graduate school centers upon research, and. 

 it is, indeed, significant that the gi-eatest. 

 encouragement ever given to research in 

 pure science has come not from our col- 

 leges, but from one whose unparalleled 

 success was achieved through the practical 

 application of principles of science to in- 

 dustrial effort. 



There is yet another standard by which 

 we may measure the intellectual growth of 

 our colleges. Their libraries in 1902 con- 

 tained 2.1 times as many volumes as in 

 1890. Public libraries not connected with 

 colleges, however, achieved the same in- 

 crease in the same interval. 



We now approach the consideration of 

 the growth of our colleges in material 

 things between 1889-90 and 1902^ and the-. 



