RECENT CRITICISM OF AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP. 
Address of the Retiring President, Charles S. Slichter. 
“In spite of much notable achievement, America’s position in 
the world of Science is inferior.” This quotation from an arti¬ 
cle by Carl Snyder in a recent number of the Horth American 
Review, may be taken as a concise statement of the main tenet 
of that paper, as well as the final conclusion from the great 
flood of denial, explanation and further criticism which the 
original article has called forth in American and European 
periodicals. A professional critic can always be distinguished 
by the simple open-or-shut test which he applies to any propo¬ 
sition which comes under his critical eye. There is to him 
no mean ground, no qualifying circumstance. His finely bal¬ 
anced judgment is like the litmus paper of the chemist; if it 
be applied to one proposition and turn red, that means one con¬ 
clusion ; if it turn blue, that means the opposite conclusion. In 
the rainbow of the true critic there are no colors but red and 
blue. So in the paper referred to, we need not be surprised 
if Ave fail to find a careful analysis of the subject under dis¬ 
cussion. A blue or red test is more to Mr. Snyder’s liking. 
Hie adopts, therefore, the simple device of establishing his 
proposition by a series of comparisons between American and 
Continental achievement in selected lines of research, with no 
attempt at explanation, or discussion of causes or present ten¬ 
dencies. Our attention is first directed to Pasteur’s memora¬ 
ble discovery of forty years ago, that the process of fermenta¬ 
tion is due to the action of micro-organisms. The culmina¬ 
tion of Pasteur’s researches in the germ theory of disease, and 
the great army of workers in European states that took up 
and extended Pasteur’s work is contrasted with the claim that 
in all the brilliant list of discoveries and applications, not one 
