6o2 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



measure for the quality of all the original work he does, and as our 

 educational institutions, equipped with their splendid libraries, museum8 

 and laboratories, are the only places where men are supposed to give 

 their entire time to knowing things and to training others to know, 

 therefore the tone, as we say, of its universities, their attitude towards 

 science, is the chief determining cause of the part any nation takes in 

 adding to the sum of human knowledge and of human power; and 

 therefore too it is properly expected of them that they shall seek the 

 highest type of scholarship, and constantly maintain that peculiar en- 

 vironment that stimulates to creative work. The spirit of its commu- 

 nity of course has more or less influence on the work of every university, 

 but it is never of first importance, for each takes the institution in its 

 midst for a model, and as no one rises to the level of his ideal, so too 

 no community equals even in sterile scholarship, much less productive, 

 that of its university. In the main this spirit of the community is but 

 that of its own college reflected in a modified and enfeebled form. Of 

 course there are good and bad reflectors, but everywhere the important 

 thing is the quality and intensity of the central light. In fact the 

 public, whose business is the making of money and the getting of bonds, 

 can not be expected to be so enthusiastic about these higher things as are 

 educational institutions whose very existence is for the development of 

 brains and the training of hands, and therefore for some time to come 

 the university is likely to remain, as it has been in the past, the source 

 of much the greater part of all original knowledge, in spite of the fact 

 that at present there is an increasing amount coming from governmental 

 and from business laboratories, for both these latter, necessarily, are 

 greatly restricted in their fields of operation. Business men wish con- 

 ducted investigations that promise immediate financial returns to them- 

 selves, and investigators that do this class of work have something of the 

 same restrictions thrown about them that hedge in the advertising poet 

 whose inspiration is a special brand of soap ; and mighty little of a first 

 class order has ever come from either source. Government institutions, 

 though allowing a greater latitude than do business firms in the investi- 

 gations selected, often feel compelled to have for their object immediate 

 returns that will encourage congress and the country to continue their 

 support, and only too frequently does this lead to insistent calls for 

 " copy," as though the investigator could submit at stated intervals 

 original ideas and finished results with the same regularity that the 

 farmer can raise a new crop of pumpkins. 



There remain the special laboratories of the Carnegie Institution 

 that are an inspiration to all the world, but even here the investigator 

 is not so free as is the university professor to follow whithersoever his 

 tastes and his talents may lead, and, besides, even these laboratories have 

 not the opportunity that the university has of fixing the lives of men, of 

 molding public opinion and of determining the destiny of our country. 



