tion, but the time may come when its survival will be a nuisance.
An academy may of course perform valuable services as a center of organization. This is the case with the Royal Society, which to a certain extent corresponds to the continental academies, but with three or four hundred members it is reasonably democratic. As the eighteenth century was the era of academies, the nineteenth was the era of special societies for the separate sciences and of democratic associations for the advancement of science. In the present century specialization will increase still further and men of science will become still more numerous; it will be necessary to replace an aristocracy and a plebescite with a representative form of government.
THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS BEFORE THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION.
The French Association for the Advancement of Science held its annual meeting in August, and the corresponding German and British associations held their meetings in September. Reports of these meetings have not as yet come to hand, except that an abstract of Professor James Dewar's presidential address before the Belfast meeting of the British Association has been cabled to the daily papers. It appears from this report that the address was largely devoted to a review of the progress of physical chemistry, but reference was made to recent munificent benefactions to science and education, especially the gifts of Mr. Carnegie and the late Cecil Rhodes. Professor Dewar said he thought that the means chosen by Mr. Rhodes were not the most effective which could have been selected, but that it must be remembered that Mr. Rhodes's aims were political as much as educational. "He had a noble and worthy ambition to promote the enduring friendship of the great English-speaking communities of the world, and he was probably also influenced by the hope that a large influx of strangers would broaden Oxford's notions."
Referring to Mr. Carnegie's endowment of Scottish universities and the foundation of an institution at Washington as of more direct benefit to higher education than the bequest of Mr. Rhodes, Professor Dewar is reported to have remarked that the establishment of the institution at Washington meant a scouring of the Old World as well as the New for the best men in every department. In fact, he said, the assiduous collecting of brains for the benefit of America was similar to the collecting of rare books and works of art which Americans were now carrying on so lavishly.
Reviewing the meager gifts to the Royal Institution of Great Britain during the past century, he said that, without such endowments as Mr. Carnegie's, the outlook for disinterested research was rather dark. The Carnegie Institution could dispose in one year of as much money as the Royal Institution had expended in a century on its purely scientific work, and it would be interesting to note how far the output of scientific work corresponded to the hundredfold application of money to its production.
Speaking on the subject of applied chemistry, Professor Dewar criticized the 'deplorable backwardness' of Great Britain, as compared with foreign countries. Taking Germany as an example, he declared that, notwithstanding the immense range of chemical industries in which the United Kingdom had once been prominent, Germany today employed a professional staff three times as great as the United Kingdom, and as superior in technical training and acquirements as it was numerically. German chemical manufacturers enjoyed a practical monopoly, which enabled them to exact huge profits from the rest of the world and to establish in an almost unassailable position industries which were largely
