Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/106

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
102
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
Palace of Electricity.

audience which probably averaged about fifty, consisting in part of specialists and in part of chance visitors. It was but seldom that students of one science listened to speakers in another, and the opportunities to become personally acquainted were inadequate. Officers of the army of science were paid to be present, but the rank and file of American workers were not there. And this was largely the fault of defective organization. We have, apart from the national scientific societies and local academies, at least four institutions which should have worked in harmony with the congress—the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, the Smithsonian Institution and the Carnegie Institution. But the cooperation of none of these bodies was secured, the head of none of them was present at St. Louis. They even worked at cross purposes, the American Association having met at St. Louis last Christmas and the National Academy having met at Chicago in November. An attempt to unify science which made no use of existing organizations was seriously at fault. The management also failed to bring science and scholarship into con-