work, and have used the Association for the advancement of their personal objects and interests.
Dissatisfied with the results of this organization, several of its founders and most prominent members drew off in 1863 and organized the National Academy of Sciences. Its plan was an imitation of the French Academy; it allied itself to the General Government by which it was incorporated, and was limited to fifty members, with whom was the power of filling any vacancies that might arise. Here at last was an American institution sufficiently exclusive for the most exacting, and which could not be meddled with by the crowd of charlatans and incompetents without. It would seem that this arrangement, by giving original investigators a field of their own, ought to have met the difficulty and opened the way to the management of the original Association in a more liberal spirit. It is hardly too much to have expected that, when the National Academy had been organized on a basis which gave the most perfect protection to original investigators, and thus removed a serious American difficulty, the American Association might have widened its scope and placed itself upon the broad ground occupied by the British Association. But such has not been the effect. Instead of extending its scope and laboring to increase its general influence, the new constitution just adopted holds to the original aim of the Association, and concedes nothing to the growing popular demand for scientific guidance and enlightenment. Its main concernment seems to be still about scientific dignity, and it has actually entered upon the funny experiment of creating distinctions and distributing honors among its members. The old and troublesome question, "Who shall be greatest?" still vexes the souls of the managing magnates, who have solved it by the ingenious procedure of creating an order of "fellows." We have characterized this proceeding as funny, but if the bare fact be held as insufficient to justify such a characterization, then we have the further circumstance that the whole rabble of the membership are allowed to become "fellows" by the extra payment of two dollars apiece, which we think is certainly a very puerile piece of business.
We have very great respect for this Association, and believe that, notwithstanding its limitations, it has been productive of much good in this country. We have attended many of its meetings for the past twenty years, and found them instructive and profitable, while the past history of the organization affords ground of hope that it will be productive of still greater good in the future. But we believe that it would have been still more useful if it had been dominated by a broader spirit, and that as the interests of science are widening and deepening, and coming to be more generally recognized, it will be still more necessary in the future that the American Association for the Advancement of Science shall take them into earnest and systematic account.
NEW EXPERIMENTS IN EDUCATION.
It was an important step in the progress of knowledge when the bodily constitution of man began to be studied in the light of its relations to the inferior, orders of life, and it promises to be a no less important step when the human mind is also so regarded. The study of mental manifestations in inferior creatures is becoming a systematic branch of inquiry, and the observers in this field are beginning to apply their method in the human sphere. We do not say that they have a new psychology, or claim to have arrived at any remarkable results; it is only noteworthy that those who have been engaged in discriminating among the mental likenesses and differences of horses, dogs,
