470 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that engineers of mark shall offer their opinions on the papers 

 presented. In the planning of such discussion lies a way of 

 escape from the narrowness and sterility which ever threaten 

 specialization in its modern extremes. 



It has often been suggested that some broad question, as the 

 probable age of the earth, be considered at a joint meeting of all 

 the sections of the American Association. Physicists, geologists, 

 and naturalists vary by millions of years in their estimates of the 

 length of our planet's life. The surveys of the special sciences 

 into which, for convenience* sake, inquiry here is parceled out, 

 plainly do not fit together as the parts of an accordant map. 

 Clearly there is need of more light, of exploration of intervening 

 and debatable territory, of new and reconciling generalization. 

 It is in its untraversed border lands, rather than in its measured 

 and cultivated areas, that science has promise and inspiration for 

 the investigator. Discussions are difficult to arrange, and in the 

 ordinary case are unsatisfactory, but in overcoming the obstacles 

 to assigning the specialist a part in the orchestration of high 

 inquiry is rescue from the danger that in the minute study of 

 details their value in constructive thought, in mutual illumina- 

 tion, may be forgotten. At this point re-enters, too, the ever 

 desirable feasibility of interesting the general public, of making 

 the people feel that here and there stand open doors between the 

 questions which come home to them and the fields tilled by men 

 of research. 



This matter of interesting the public can at times find its op- 

 portunity when the programme is elastic enough to admit the 

 treatment of a question of moment which springs up after the 

 programme has taken form. Last August the American Eco- 

 nomic Association met at Chautauqua ; most of those who took 

 part in its sessions passed at Buffalo through files of State militia 

 guarding the trains against strikers and rioters. The programme, 

 an excellent one, from the inevitable absence of men expected to 

 read papers, could not be fully carried out. Here was a chance 

 for leading teachers in politics and economics to express them- 

 selves regarding a battle between capital and labor pitched in the 

 very neighborhood ; outside the session hall, scarcely anything 

 else was talked about ; within the hall, Buffalo might have been 

 in Asia for all the attention it received. Can men of science of 

 the academic type wonder at their lack of popular influence when 

 they thus ignore the world of action and passion they live in ; 

 when they speak and write mainly at one another, and usually 

 in a language hardly comprehensible to common people when 

 they happen to overhear it ? It strikes observers in New York 

 that the power of its corrupt rulers has arisen in no small degree 

 because the leaders among them have been fortunate or shrewd 





