two cults as to the other names nearly equal. Thus, a rule of pure discipline, foreign to the doctrines and which has not always existed in the Church, has had bad consequences for science in Roman Catholic countries.
Classes of ideas, feelings, sympathies, and antipathies may be transmitted in families by imitation or tradition, and have great influence on the course of their members. They often result from some great event which has made a marked impression on the family; and we may have among the number traditions favorable to the pursuit of science. Pointed examples are afforded of them in the history of some of the Protestant families who were expelled from Roman Catholic countries in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Among these are the nine Bernouillis, who were famous in mathematics or physics. Of the men of this class there have been eleven of the one hundred and one foreign associates of the French Academy—an enormous proportion for a total population of less than a million souls. If the same proportion had ruled among, say, the Germans at large, we should have had three hundred and thirty German foreign associates instead of twenty-three; or in the United Kingdom, one hundred and thirty British associates instead of twenty-seven; and ten of these eleven lived in Switzerland. We might increase this number if we could trace all the cases of descent from refugee mothers. The English Puritans, who emigrated to this country, had essentially the same dispositions and character with the French Protestant refugees of the sixteenth century. Their descendants, direct and indirect, in New England have also shown favorable tendencies toward sciences of every kind. They have given Franklin and Rumford to the European academies and have furnished other distinguished men of science and historians and men of letters in the United States. The current immigration to the United States, being composed chiefly of working-men, does not bear the promise of exercising influence on the progress of science. But if every emigrant-vessel carried only one such man as Nuttall, Agassiz, Engelmann, Marcou, or Pourtales, we might expect different results. These men and others like them are already laying the foundations of good scientific traditions, and are adding their influence to that of the Pilgrims of New England.
Public opinion is beneficial or not, according as it encourages or gives the stamp of fashion to those tastes and aims which are congenial with scientific pursuits, or to the opposite ones. Form of government seems to exercise but little positive influence. Provided civilization is not destroyed by long seasons of revolutionary violence or wars, there is no reason for supposing that scientific work will be arrested in any country solely on account of its political régime. Customs are much more important, and also education and family traditions. The most favorable geographical situations are in the midst of civilized nations, in the temperate zone. Science does not prosper in
