Slick ter—Recent Criticism of American 8 cholarskip. 5 
Speculation about the unknown must give way for a time to 
attention to the more immediate necessities. The savage must 
be driven back, the soil must be reclaimed, shelter must be pro¬ 
vided. Next, roads, canals, and means of communication must 
be established, cities built, churches and schools erected. Then 
business, commerce, and manufacturing must be fostered be¬ 
fore profits and surplus can accumulate wherewith to provide 
for leisure and to sustain the arts and sciences. I take it that 
it is the coming of age of commercialism in this country that 
has brought technical science to its present commanding place; 
unless things go quite wrong, the natural evolution of events 
should next culminate in a like development of pure science. 
The coming change is foreshadowed in the modified character 
of technical science. In former days engineering technology 
was founded chiefly upon current practice rather than upon 
established principles; it was more closely allied to the crafts 
than to science. Not only is that day past, but it is no longer 
the case that technical science looks entirely to pure science 
for its fundamental material. It has so grown that it is in¬ 
vestigating for itself and, in greater and greater measure, 
developing basal principles for its many needs. There are 
very few American treatises in pure science which will com¬ 
pare in scientific thoroughness with several treatises which have 
lately issued from the engineering press. This is a very hope¬ 
ful sign in the growth of knowledge 1 —to see applied science and 
pure science approaching each other at numerous points, so 
that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish any line of de¬ 
marcation between them. In this change, science is not sacri¬ 
ficing any of its strength nor compromising its ideals. It is 
technology that is changing—that is becoming less empirical, 
less conservative, more systematic, more quantitative, more 
exact, more scientific. 
The technical schools are planning their own departments for 
research and higher work. The Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology has organized such a department during the cur¬ 
rent year, while one of the plans dearest to the heart of the 
late Dean Johnson was an endowment fund for technical re¬ 
search at Wisconsin. 
