In spite of the liberal national and private assistance granted, the public institutions have, until a short time ago, not been overconspicuous for scholarship, as is openly declared in a number of recent articles on this subject, by Professor Münsterberg of Harvard,[1] Mr. Carl Snyder,[2] and Professor Simon Newcomb of the Naval Observatory, Washington.[3] These writers repeat the complaints which Professor Rowland of Johns Hopkins had uttered more than twenty-five years ago.[4] Professor Münsterberg, in the said article of the Atlantic Monthly, repudiates the charge that America has no scholarship at all; he affirms that the situation is infinitely better than Europeans suppose it to be – in certain branches of knowledge excellent work has been done. Nevertheless the author is compelled to continue: "And yet I am convinced that the result stands in no proper relation to the achievements of American culture in all the other aspects of national life, and the best American scholars everywhere frankly acknowledge and seriously deplore it. ... American publications cross the ocean in a ridiculously small number; in the world of letters no Columbus has yet discovered the other side of the globe."[5] Years ago, Dr. McCosh had passed a similar verdict: "The scholarship of the great body of the students is as high in America as in Europe; but they rear in Great Britain and Germany a body of ripe scholars to whom we have nothing equal in the New World."[6]
