Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/48

the United States reserving 150,000,000 acres of national lands for the promotion of scientific education. In some respects this young country is in advance of all European nations in joining science to its administrative offices. Its scientific publications, like the great paleontological work embodying the researches of Professor Marsh and his associates in the Geological Survey, are an example to other Governments. The Minister of Agriculture is surrounded with a staff of botanists and chemists. The Home Secretary is aided by a special Scientific Commission to investigate the habits, migrations, and food of fishes, and the latter has at its disposal two specially constructed steamers of large tonnage. The United States and Great Britain promote fisheries on distinct systems. In this country we are perpetually issuing expensive commissions to visit the coasts, in order to ascertain the experiences of fishermen. I have acted as chairman of one of these Royal Commissions, and found that the fishermen, having only a knowledge of a small area, gave the most contradictory and unsatisfactory evidence. In America the questions are put to Nature, and not to fishermen. Exact and searching investigations are made into the life-history of the fishes, into the temperature of the sea in which they live and spawn, into the nature of their food, and into the habits of their natural enemies. For this purpose the Government gave the co-operation of the navy, and provided the Commission with a special corps of skilled naturalists, some of whom go out with the steamships, and others work in the biological laboratories at Wood's Holl, Massachusetts, or at Washington. The different universities send their best naturalists to aid in these investigations, which are under the direction of Mr. Baird, of the Smithsonian Institution. The annual cost of the Federal Commission is about forty thousand pounds, while the separate States spend about twenty thousand pounds in local efforts. The practical results flowing from these scientific investigations have been important. The inland waters and rivers have been stocked with fish of the best and most suitable kinds. Even the great ocean which washes the coasts of the United States is beginning to be affected by the knowledge thus acquired, and a sensible result is already produced upon the most important of its fisheries. The United Kingdom largely depends upon its fisheries, but as yet our Government have scarcely realized the value of such scientific investigations as those pursued with success by the United States. Less systematically, but with great benefit to science, our own Government has used the surveying expeditions, and sometimes has equipped special expeditions to promote natural history and solar physics. Some of the latter, like the voyage of the Challenger, have added largely to the store of knowledge; while the former, though not primarily intended for scientific research, have had an indirect result of infinite value by becoming training-schools for such investigators as Edward Forbes, Darwin, Hooker, Huxley, Wyville Thomson, and others.