Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/316
312
��THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
��built at a cost of $15,000,000 may be an asset or a burden. An equal sum spent in selecting and educating 3,000 scien- tific men would nearly double the num- ber of men the country competent to advance science. The dreadnaught is a continual expense, it depreciates 'it the rate of a million dollars a year, Its existence tends to exert an influence toward a war of aggression. The three thousand scientific men would add < o the wealth of the country in peace, to its strength in a war of defense. If two years ago the officers of the Ger- man army had been put on the ships of the British navy and the ships had been sunk in the Atlantic, it would have been for the welfare of the world. If the number of men engaged in scientific re- search and in the applications of sci- ence could be doubled, the gain would be incalculable.
If we wish to make the nation strong in defense we should care for our chil- dren and our schools, for our scientific men and our universities — in this par- ticular number of The Popular Sci- ence Monthly it may be permitted to add — for our journals devoted to the diffusion and advancement of science.
SCIENTIFIC ITEMS
We record with regret the death of Frederick Ward Putnam, the distin- guished anthropologist of Harvard Uni- versity; of Dr. John Ulric Nef, head of the department of chemistry of the University of Chicago, and of Dr. Joseph Austin Holmes, director of the U. S. Bureau of Mines.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science held a success- ful meeting at San Francisco, Berkeley,
��! and Stanford University, during the first week of August. The address of the president, Dr. W. W. Campbell, di- rector of the Lick Observatory, which was printed in the issue of Science for August 20, is entitled ' ' Science and
{ Civilization."
A marble chair is to be placed in the open-air Greek Theater of the Univer-
' sity of California in honor of Eugene Waldemar Hilgard, professor of agri- culture and dean of the College of Agriculture from 1875 to 1906, and
i now professor emeritus.- — Professor I?. A. Millikan, of the department of phys- ics, has been elected president of the University of Chicago Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
Dr. William H. Welch, professor of pathology in the Johns Hopkins Univer- sity, and Dr. Simon Flexner, director of the laboratories of the Eockefeller Institute for Medical Eesearch, have sailed for China where they go on be- '< half of the China Medical Board of the Eockefeller Foundation to report on the medical schools and hospitals. — The schooner George B. Cluett, chartered by the Crocker Land relief expedition to go in quest of Donald B. MaeMillan and the members of his party in Green- land, has sailed from North Sydney, Nova Scotia. Dr. Edmund Otis Hovey, of the American Museum of Natural History, chairman of the Crocker Land
Exploration Committee, is in charge.
i
Governor Dunne has signed the bill
giving $5,000,000 to the University of
. Illinois for the biennium. It is the
largest grant made in a single law to
any university in the United States.
�� �
