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THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE
307
Main Building, Desert Laboratory, Tucson, Arizona.

thus opportunity for more workers. But the difficulty in the United States appears to be a lack of men rather than a lack of positions or of equipment. Those employed by the Carnegie Institution are somewhat isolated in their research stations and their influence in attracting men to research work and training them to it is less than it would be at the universities. University professors have positions which should make the scientific career attractive to young men of ability and purpose. The associations of the university are on the whole pleasant and honorable. With his colleagues, his ] assistants and his more advanced students the professor has a stimulus to good work and opportunity to make it I effective. As a rule the position is a life appointment; there are pensions, vacations and sabbatical leaves of absence. Yet, in spite of these attractions, it is difficult to find men of distinction for university chairs. It may be that they are not being born in sufficient numbers, but it is more likely that they are not found. The comparatively small salaries and the somewhat unsatisfactory methods of university control may be partly responsible. Whatever the difficulty may be, the pressing need of the present time is to find men: providing positions and equipment is scarcely of use except in so far as this may attract men.

The Carnegie Institution has taken men from universities and from other institutions; it has not made new men of science or attracted men to scientific work. This it might have done by giving opportunity to men who could not otherwise find it, or by paying such salaries and conferring such privileges on scientific men as would make the career attractive to the best men. The salaries paid are not made public, but they are probably as small as will obtain and retain the men that are needed. The bureaucratic or department store system, which is the chief danger of the university, is in the case of the Carnegie Institution carried to an extreme, for the collective sentiment of a group of scholars, which is the balance wheel of the university, is there absent. It may be impossible for such an institution to accomplish more for science than it is doing; but certainly the official statement of its plans published eight years ago appeal more to the imagination. It reads:

It is proposed to found in the city of Washington, in the spirit of Washington, an institution which, with the cooperation of institutions now or hereafter established, there or elsewhere, shall, in the broadest and most liberal manner, encourage investigation, research