ii8 Editorial Comment. 
EDITORIAL COMMENT. 
THE PARLIAMENT OF SCIENCE IN THE UNITED STATES. 
It is the task of the historian and sociologist to determine how 
far the example set by the fathers of our republic in reverting- 
to the old and eminently just idea of representative and popular 
government, influenced the action of all guilds, professions and 
classes of society in making concert of action in order to secure 
greater power, broader views, and more systematic progress ^ 
but it is certain that the idea of combination has been growing 
steadily during the past century until scarcely a case where it 
will apply is untried. 
Corporation, corner, and trust on the side of capital are met by 
organization, boycott, and strike on the part of labor; and from 
the editorial staff composed of the ambitious pupils of the bo3f's 
schools to the eastern alliance of undertakers, every temporary- 
association of human beings either through personal propinquity 
or a community of business interest is made to produce that 
strange thing, abstract in reality, yet so much wiser, stronger 
and more formidable than any one or two of the component 
parts of which it is formed, called a society. 
Of course this tendency has extended itself to science which. 
is of the classes which can derive the greatest benefit from such 
community of work and unity of purpose, because creative- 
science or original research, in penetrating beyond the domains 
of the known, needs every help which the most varied ex- 
perience and the soundest induction can give it, and these are 
derived not from a few but from many minds. It is true that 
here is a class of soi-disant geniuses which keeps itself from 
being entirely forgotten by denying the utility of all those pos- 
tulates which centuries of experience have produced, who suc- 
ceed in imitating real genius only in the degree and not in the 
kind of its eccentricities, and in nothing else. This class is de- 
lighted in making the plodders stare at its sweeping denials of 
all the fundamental principles to which the investigation of 
truth for its own sake has led, and substitutes for them a smart 
