the people, just as the American Museum of Natural History is worth three hundred thousand dollars a year and Columbia University is worth four million dollars a year. But a private corporation can not be expected to subscribe indefinitely ten thousand dollars a year for the benefit of the public. The weekly journal Science was in like manner supported for a time by Dr. A. Graham Bell and Mr. Gardiner G. Hubbard, at a total expense of about eighty thousand dollars. There are over a hundred journals and proceedings devoted to the publication of research work in America not one of which pays its expenses on a regular business basis. Magazines connected with applied science and popular mechanics may do so. This represents a step in advance, which we may hope indicates that ultimately there may be a general interest in other and more fundamental departments of science.
It would probably be undesirable for scientific journals to be directly subsidized or endowed. Indirectly they are now subsidized by the work of contributors and editors supported by endowed or tax-supported institutions and by subscriptions from public libraries. In so far as they require additional support, it can probably best come through an increase in the number of public libraries subscribing for such journals and by an increase of subscribers among those who may realize the importance of supporting an institution essential to society and its betterment.
SCIENCE AND NATIONAL WELFARE
One of the alleviating circumstances in the disaster of this war is the fact that it thrusts on the attention of all the place that science holds in national and international affairs. Science does not necessarily or at once make us moral or wise, although its general influence is in this direction. Human nature can not be greatly altered by a change in the environment effective for a short period and on some individuals. But when the new conditions become general and individuals are favored who fit into them, so that an altered race is preserved by natural selection, science will make our morality and enforce its observance. We may look forward to the
Field Railway used in the German Advance in Russia. Within a week of the capture of Warsaw an express railway service has been established between Lille and Warsaw.
