sometimes that she is thus favored because she is more beautiful, more winsome, than her sisters. Well, possibly this is true; it may be or it may not be. We need not stop to discuss relative merits in this particular, since it is quite aside from the question. If other sciences must do what astronomy is doing in order to get on, and if money in more abundance is essential for this, then more money must be secured by those needing it. If astronomy, by reason of greater winsomeness, is able to get it more easily, that is her good fortune. So far as the essential matter is concerned, it can be only a question of overcoming greater difficulties by greater effort. But the real things are merit and need. When these both are, first, strongly felt, and, second, strongly presented, they are pretty sure to have a relaxing effect upon purse strings somewhere sooner or later, particularly in our country where wealth is so abundant and the general spirit of giving for the promotion of learning so much abroad.
Some of the practical bearings that a wider application of the principle of organization in research would have may now be briefly noticed.
In the first place, as touching the status of research in the universities, there can be no doubt that were research a primary rather than an incidental matter with the scientific departments of the universities, the principle could be applied, without specially greater expenditure of money, to an extent quite impossible under the present order. Supposing, for example, the department of botany of University X were to be organized and equipped primarily with reference to a comprehensive botanical survey of the particularly interesting botanical region in which it may happen to be located; how vastly greater would be its efficiency in forwarding botanical science than if its composition were determined by some other consideration, say the needs of instruction, and the botanical survey were to take its chance. Or again, suppose the department of geology of University Y, situated in a region especially favorable for investigations in dynamic geology, were to be organized primarily with reference to such investigation. A department thus constituted would promote this aspect of geology with a degree of certainty and efficiency quite out of question under prevailing conditions. A point of importance should here be noted relative to what the organizing of a university department on such lines as indicated could mean. Such a department of geology, for example, need not consist merely of the geologists that would constitute the ordinary teaching department of geology, but it would contain for the special needs of the investigations, and hence selected and compensated with reference to this end, persons belonging primarily to other fields of science, and hence presumably to other university departments; and there would be no reason why these should not be members of other
