has not only a journal of its own, but is growing in a way which,
though slow, has all the marks of healthy progress towards an end
the importance of which has scarcely dawned upon the public mind.

Admitting that an organized association of investigators is of the
first necessity to secure the best results in the scientific work
of the future, we meet the question of the conditions and auspices
under which they are to be brought together. The first thought to
strike us at this point may well be that we have, in our great
universities, organizations which include most of the leading men
now engaged in scientific research, whose personnel and facilities
we should utilize. Admitting, as we all do, that there are already
too many universities, and that better work would be done by a
consolidation of the smaller ones, a natural conclusion is that
the end in view will be best reached through existing
organizations. But it would be a great mistake to jump at this
conclusion without a careful study of the conditions. The brief
argument--there are already too many institutions--instead of
having more we should strengthen those we have--should not be
accepted without examination. Had it been accepted thirty years
ago, there are at least two great American universities of to-day
which would not have come into being, the means devoted to their
support having been divided among others. These are the Johns
Hopkins and the University of Chicago. What would have been gained
by applying the argument in these cases? The advantage would have
been that, instead of 146 so-called universities which appear to-
day in the Annual Report of the Bureau of Education, we should
have had only 144. The work of these 144 would have been
strengthened by an addition, to their resources, represented by
the endowments of Baltimore and Chicago, and sufficient to add