terial side we want nothing new at present; we require no increase in the number of our museums, observatories, or laboratories during the present generation. What we do want. can be seen by studying the logical connection of our several deficiencies, as we have sought to point them out. We are deficient in the number of men actively devoted to scientific research of the higher types, in public recognition of the labors of those who are so engaged, in the machinery for making the public acquainted with their labors and their wants, and in the pecuniary means for publishing their researches. Each of these deficiencies is, to a certain extent, both a cause and an effect of the others. The want of public recognition and appreciation is due partly to a want of system and organization, partly to the paucity of scientific publications. The paucity of research is largely due to the want of adequate reward in public estimation and recognition; while the paucity of scientific publications is due to the want of an adequate number of supporters. The supply of any one of these deficiencies would, to a certain extent, remedy all the others; and until one or more are so remedied, it is hopeless to expect any great improvement. In other intellectual nations, science has a fostering mother, —in Germany the universities, in France the government, in England the scientific societies; and if science could find one here, it would speedily flourish. The only one it can look to here is the educated public; and if that public would find some way of expressing in a public and official manner its generous appreciation of the labors of American investigators, we should have the best entering wedge for supplying all the wants of our science. The precise form which such a recognition should take is comparatively unimportant, but the most natural one would seem to be that of medals or testimonials to be awarded from time to time to the authors of important published researches. The testimonials should have as much of a national character as possible, and should not be so few in number as to discourage the great mass of investigators from competing. Indeed, it might be well if the encouragement of beginners was made their principal object.

The other way in which help could be most effectively given at small expense is by the support of two or three first-class

journals of exact science. We say exact science, because this is the department which is worst supplied in this respect; taking mathematics at one extreme and medicine at the other, we can pretty accurately gauge the exactness of each science by the difficulty its cultivators find in supporting journals devoted to it. It may seem like reducing our thesis to the ridiculous to say that our wants in this respect could be well supplied at a cost of five or six thousand dollars per annum, and that the future prospect of the mathematical sciences in this land depend very largely on their cultivators being able to command this annual sum for the purpose indicated.

On the whole, we have not been able to present the first century in roseate colors; and while we can well contemplate the future with hope, we cannot do so with entire confidence. If we ask what this signifies, we are at once led into questions which the thinker and the man of action may discuss indefinitely, but to which no answer can be returned which will command universal assent. It is admitted that if we consider only the general excellence and success of our applied science, if we reflect how well we have utilized the discoveries made by others, by developing them into railways, bridges, telegraphs, manufactures, machinery, and weapons of warfare, we have every reason to be well pleased with our success. Is this not enough to satisfy us? The standing of nations in the world depends solely on the effectiveness of their cannon, and will long continue to do so; the intellectual nations are foremost only because they know best how to forge cannon. Is it, then, worth our while to set up any other standard to measure ourselves by? To take a little higher basis for our inquiries, the fundamental idea of our social system is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and if the intellect of the masses is developing satisfactorily, can we not dispense with philosophers of every description? Suppose the higher types of exact thought should disappear entirely from among us, is there any danger that sudden calamity would overtake us, or slow decay undermine our national life? Or if, ascending above all considerations of mere utility, we inquire into the intellectual status to which, as a nation, we are entitled, ought we to draw any unfavorable conclusions from a deficiency in the higher

forms of thought? It may be claimed that the number of men in each generation who can make a permanent impression on the literature, science, or art of a people are necessarily very few in number, so few, in fact, that their presence or absence is hardly felt in estimating the average intellect of the nation. The fact that the score or so of men necessary to enable our country to make a brilliant intellectual showing may not be found, does not in any way militate against the average intellect of the twenty or thirty millions who live in it. From this point of view, a nation in which every one, from the legislator to the day-laborer, could read and appreciate Plato, would be, intellectually, the greatest nation of the world, though it could not show the beginning of an intellectual life peculiar to itself. A community in which every man had a good grammar-school education would, from the same standpoint, be the best edueated in the world, though not a member of it had ever seen the inside of a college.

To dispute the question what intellectual status should be assigned to communities such as these would be were logomachy, and to question the desirableness of a state of things in which every member of the community, however humble, should be thoroughly educated, would be running counter to that idea of the universal diffusion of the highest means of happiness on which our society is based. Still, while in no way decrying a state of society in which every ploughboy could read Plato, we must point out that all the wants of our civilization would not thus be satisfied. In the complex operations of that civilization we may see the same necessity of a division of labor, and the same absence of necessity that any one man shall be able to do everything, that we see in the operations of mere industry. In a factory, the highest efficiency is reached when each kind of productive faculty is employed in the proper proportion, from the skill of the single managing head to that of the thousand operatives. In the same way the proper advance of our civilization requires the harmonious co-operation of minds of many orders, each present in the proper number. Its operations are most effectively performed when every member of society is able to perform his peculiar duties to his fellow-members in the most effective

way, and in which some one is found to perform every function necessary to the progress of the whole. However desirable it may be that each individual should be able to do as many things as possible, the requirements of society at large do not extend beyond the limits we have indicated. That nation will advance most rapidly in which the statesmen have the strongest intellects and the navvies the strongest bodies. There is no more need that the latter should have the heads of statesmen than that the former should be able to handle the spade.

We may now see that while the neglect of philosophic research which we have pointed out may not diminish our judgment of the average American intellect, it does indicate a great want of one of the factors of our civilization. Scientific research, and the presence of those ideas on which civilization is founded, are so closely connected, and each is so productive of the other, that they cannot be separated. The fact that a very small number of investigators are sufficient to build and maintain the science of a country, should not blind us to the importance of their work. If we could count the men whose death in their cradles would have resulted in the continuance of the Dark Ages to the present time, the original minds whose thoughts have leavened our whole lump, we should find it to be fearfully small. The fact that their number is small, and their influence exerted in ways so occult to the ordinary mind that they cannot be traced, naturally leads to a general under-estimate of the importance of their functions. In visiting a factory, the superficial observer sees only the outward operations of the establishment, and may be easily led to believe that mechanical labor is the only important agency in its inception and continuance. The business skill of a few men, without which a large fraction of the operatives might have been running the streets in idleness, or engaging in less remunerative labor, lies far in the background of his field of vision. Still further back lies the skill of the inventor who devised the mechanical operations he witnesses, while the genius of the physicist who discovered the natural laws on which the invention is founded is entirely beyond his range.

Not dissimilar are the views of the various elements of our social organization taken by those whose breadth of knowledge

and depth of understanding are not such as to enable them to trace all the causes at work in society. We are familiar with a class who see nothing in society, or at least in its industrial operations, beyond the work of the physical laborer. Another class, of a wider range of vision, can see the functions of the organizer and the capitalist, without whom the means to make labor effective would be entirely wanting. The class who can fully grasp the functions of the purely intellectual laborers is yet smaller. Not because intellectual laborers are entirely unappreciated by the public at large, but because an incorrect view is taken of their functions. To the average intelligent citizen philosophical thought and scientific research, when not immediately directed to some obvious practical end, are mere ornaments, the trimmings in fact of the social edifice. They may be ornaments with which he would not willingly part; still it is only as ornaments that he values them, and if something must be lopped off, he is too apt to let them go first.

Among the fallacious ideas which pervade society, there are none the dissipation of which is of more importance than the one thus formed of exact thought. No want from which our nation suffers is more urgent than that of a wider diffusion of the ideas and modes of thought of the exact sciences, and nothing is more fallacious than to look upon the results of such thought as purely ornamental. A large fraction of our public occupations consist in examinations and discussions of social phenomena, in which no certain result can be obtained without a logical exactness of investigation to which every-day life is an entire stranger. Each generation is determined to examine for itself the foundations of society and of government, and is strongly disposed to tear away as rubbish everything which seems to impede progress and of which it does not see the utility. To what dangers may we not be exposed if the renovation is undertaken by unskilled hands, directed by men who are not only ignorant of social laws, but incapable of exact reasoning of any kind whatever! What is required to insure us against disaster is not mere technical research, but the instruction of our intelligent and influential public in such a discipline as that of Mill's logic, to be illustrated by the methods and results of scientific research. The present great move