them from containing any thing of importance in the way of original investigation." Again: "The only place in which we can search for any thing in the shape of original contributions to mathematics is in the transactions of our learned societies; and here we find, since the Declaration of Independence, a score or two of papers professedly of this character, but it is not likely that more than one or two of them contain any thing worthy of quotation or remark. The whole of them together would not amount to so much as the mathematical journals of Europe publish in a month."
When we pass to the physical sciences, the prospect is said to be a little more encouraging. We have active workers of the highest character in experimental physics, but they are very few, and their productions small. "Here, as in every other science, we find our deficiency to increase just in proportion as the science becomes exact. Many branches of physics have attained, and nearly all the remaining branches are rapidly attaining, the mathematical stage of development. As they enter this stage, we find our American cultivators all dropping off." In exact astronomy, we have the eminent names of Bowditch and Peirce; observatories quite comparable with those of Europe, in charge of first-class men, "yet we do not find our astronomers engaging in investigations of the utmost delicacy; and the first determination of the parallax of a fixed star by an American astronomer has yet to come."
Taking scientific journals and transactions as the measure of work, we have but a solitary periodical of the first rank—Silliman's Journal. "Our two most active societies have been the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, each of which has brought out about a dozen volumes of transactions since the beginning of the century. Excluding societies whose publications are purely biological, we are not aware that half a dozen other volumes of transactions have appeared within the interval alluded to. Add the eighteen volumes published by the Smithsonian Institution, itself founded by a foreigner, and we shall have a total of between forty-five and fifty volumes in three-fourths of a century. This total, combined product of the Smithsonian Institution and all the scientific societies of the country is about equal to what either the Royal Society or the French Academy of Sciences publishes in one-third the time....
"The great mass of scientific papers in Europe do not, however, appear in transactions, but in scientific journals. Here we stand at a much more striking disadvantage. Against a hundred and fifty or two hundred pages annually on astronomy and physics in Silliman's Journal, Germany can show us two journals of pure mathematics, publishing together three or four large volumes of matter every year—two or more of mathematics and physics, one of astronomy, and one of physics and chemistry. Altogether, these journals issue ten or eleven volumes annually, half of them quarto, and half octavo."
Making allowance for a semi-popular element in English original contributions, "it is probable that, instead of finding in England, as we do in Germany, thirty or forty times as much publication of original research in exact science as in America, we should find only five or ten times as much. A comparison with France would probably be more to our disadvantage than that with England, as the Comptes Rendus of the French Academy alone contain ten times more matter pertaining to exact science than Silliman's Journal does."
In view of these results, Prof. Newcomb remarks: "Making every possible allowance, and viewing the facts from every stand-point, we shall be able to make only the most beggarly
