SCIENCE
There is no connected account of American achievement in science. Strangely enough, the most pretentious American book on the history of science, Sedgwick and Tyler’s “Short History of Science” (New York: Macmillan, 1917), ignores the most notable figures among the author’s countrymen. A useful biographical directory under the title of “American Men of Science” (New York Science Press, 1910, 2d edition), has been compiled by Professor James McKeen Cattell; a third revised edition has been prepared and issued this year prior to the appearance of the present volume.
On the tendencies manifest in the United States there are several important papers. An address by Henry A. Rowland entitled “A Plea for Pure Science” (Popular Science Monthly, vol. LIX, 1901, pp. 170–188), is still eminently worth reading. The external conditions under which American scientists labour have been repeatedly discussed in recent years in such journals as Science and School and Society, both edited by Professor Cattell, who has himself appended very important discussions to the above-cited biographical lexicon. Against over-organization Professor William Morton Wheeler has recently published a witty and vigorous protest (“The Organization of Research,” Science, January 21, 1921, N. S. vol. LIII, pp. 53–67).
In order to give an understanding of the essence of scientific activity the general reader cannot do better than to trace the processes by which the master-minds of the past have brought order into the chaos that is at first blush presented by the world of reality. In this respect the writings of the late Professor Ernst Mach are unsurpassed, and even the least mathematically trained layman can derive much insight from portions of his book “Die Mechanik” (Leipzig, 7th edition, 1912), accessible in T. J. McCormack’s translation under the title of “The Science of Mechanics” (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co.). The section on Galileo may be specially recommended. Mach’s “Erkenntnis und Irrtum” (Leipzig, 1906) contains most suggestive discussions of the psychology of investigation, dealing with such questions as the nature of a scientific problem, of experimentation, of hypothetical assumptions, etc. Much may also be learned from the general sections of P. Duhem’s “La theorie physique, son objet et sa structure” (Paris, 1906). E. Duclaux’s “Pasteur: Histoire d’un Esprit” has fortunately been rendered accessible by Erwin F. Smith and Florence Hedges under the title “Pasteur, the History of a Mind” (Philadelphia; Saunders, 1920). It reveals in masterly fashion the methods by which a great thinker overcomes not only external opposition but the more baneful obstacles of scientific folk-lore.
R. H. L.