no community can succeed in which the drones and the workers have equal access to the honey cells.
But though the project at New Harmony, judged by the measure of its founder's purposes, was a failure, still the influence for good of the men who, as a result of the experiment, became part of the life of the infant State of Indiana, is incalculable. New Harmony was located far in the backwoods, in the long-despised county of Posey, but for a time it was truly the center of American science, and to this day few names in the annals of our science are brighter than those of Le Sueur, Say, and the Owens.
To gain a just appreciation of the scientific career of Richard Owen we must consider for a moment the lives of the men of science whose dreams and projects he shared, and who were the companions of his youth. It was through the agency of William Maclure that most of these were drawn to New Harmony. Maclure was a geologist of note and an earnest student of social science. On leaving Philadelphia he planned to conduct at New Harmony a school of industry where the arts of the conquest of Nature should be taught to all. The essence of human progress, in his thought, was the increase of human knowledge. The farmer should cease to be a mere tiller of the soil, and should be trained to make the earth his benefactor. A man is better unborn than untrained. An unskilled laborer is a deformity, and they who toil should do so to the best advantage.
William Maclure published fortnightly at New Harmony a magazine called The Disseminator of Useful Knowledge, containing Hints to the Youth of the United States, from the School of Industry. Its motto was, "Ignorance is the frightful cause of human misery." Its subscription price was one dollar a year in advance.
This magazine was filled with wise reflections on social and political matters, having for lighter reading scraps of science and bits of useful information of every sort.
In the pages of the Disseminator the name of Thomas Say often appears. Say wrote on the shells of the Wabash. He followed Maclure from Philadelphia, and came down from Pittsburg in a keel boat, along with the notable company famous in the New Harmony Community as the "boat-load of knowledge."
Thomas Say had been with Long's expedition across the Rocky Mountains, and had already won fame as a naturalist and traveler. His papers on shells and insects were widely known. These investigations he continued at New Harmony. A close and conscientious observer, his work bears the stamp of a master mind. At his death in 1835 it was asserted that "he had done more to make known the zoölogy of this country than any other man." With a touch of his own modesty, one of his friends said that
