Universities And Scientific Life in the United States

scientific effort does not all come from them and although there is even a tendency to organize outside of them the most powerful institutions and those especially destined to promote discoveries, still they remain at the present time the great centres of research, and they are the environment in which future workers are trained. The productive capacity of the country rests therefore upon them; on their good qualities, on their defects, depend the fecundity or the deficiencies of American science. There is, then, an evident interest in making a study of them first, and in revealing their spirit. And also, they are so different from our own, so linked, as is natural, with the whole of American society, and with the historical conditions of its development, that a complete description is necessary in order to understand them and to analyze their part in the contemporary scientific movement. Like everything in the United States, they have passed, in the half-century since the War of Secession, through a phase of marvelous prosperity and development. Especially in the last thirty years, this movement has been accentuated. The proof of it will befound in the figures which I shall have occasion to cite in the course of the following chapters. This development has been extraordinarily rapid and consequently hasty. It has taken place in perfect freedom, in an independent manner in the different parts of the country, and not with the uniformity that a central powe...