Abstract
A MOVEMENT is on foot in the United States for rearranging the various scientific departments of the Government under one central authority, and a report on the subject has been made by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences, consisting of Gen. Meigs, and Professors Trowbridge, Pickering, Young, Walker, and Langley, appointed for the purpose. The Report is published at length in Science. After referring to the state of things in Europe in this respect, it gives a brief account of the method in which such bureaus are organised in other countries; discusses at some length the character of the work done by the coast and geodetic and the geological surveys, especially in those points where their provinces are similar, pointing out that two distinct and independent trigonometric surveys of the United States are now in process of execution; distinguishes between the military and meteorological work of the Signal Service, and recommends their complete separation; indicates the danger of duplication of work by the Coast Survey and Hydrographic Office, but is not prepared to recommend that the latter be detached in any way from the control of the Navy Department, nor that the hydrographic work of the Coast Survey, for over forty years conducted so satisfactorily, be separated from that organisation, but suggests the lines on which it thinks the Coast Survey should work; lays down the principle that the Government should not undertake any work which can be equally well done by the enterprise of individual investigators, and that such work should be confined to what will “promote the general welfare of the country;” urges the importance of a proper extension of the trigonometrical survey of the United States; and, finally, recommends either the establishment of a department of science, or of a mixed commission of nine members-two of them scientific civilians to be appointed by the president for six years, two scientific men from the army and navy, three heads of the principal scientific bureaus, together with the president of the National Academy, and the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Co-Ordination of the Scientific Bureaus of the U.S. Government . Nature 32, 317–320 (1885). https://doi.org/10.1038/032317b0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/032317b0