Editors’ Table. 1003 
disposed in various directions according to locality. Sometimes the 
columns are horizontal, resembling piled cord-wood, and all are 
generally regular and more or less artificial looking. 
From this extraordinary gorge we finally issued on a rolling 
country well covered with bunch-grass, which continued to our 
destination, the Dalles, on the Columbia river. 
` 
EDITORY TABLE. 
EDITORS: E. D. COPE AND J. S. KINGSLEY. 
In the annual address of the President of the Biological Society 
of Washington, Mr. G. Brown Goode, Assistant Secretary of 
the Smithsonian Institution, uses the following language:! “I 
think the general tendency of a careful study of the distribution of 
scientific men and institutions, is to show that the people of the 
United States, except in so far as they sanction by their approval the 
work of scientific departments of the Government, and the institu- 
tions established by private munificence, have little reason to be 
proud of the national attitude towards science.” This indictment is 
brought after a careful survey of the ground bya naturalist of 
undoubted competency, and of exceptional opportunities for acquir- 
ing information. We are compelled to agree with Secretary Goode, 
and can, we think, point out some of the conditions of this state of 
affairs. 
Our complaint is that the average American citizen does not 
know what original scientific research is, and that if he acquires 
wealth, and wishes to do something for the benefit of his fellow- 
men, as he does more frequently than the citizen of any other 
country, he does not do anything for the production of knowledge. 
He devotes money to schools and to libraries, but towards the 
creation of the books to be used in them, and the truths to be taught 
in them, he does nothing. Forgetting the lessons of his business 
training, he apparently imagines that knowledge is derived from 
_ Some mysterious internal process of the mind, and that the producer 
1 1887, pp. 92-3. 
