Not a Hundred Millionaires: The National Academy and the Expansion of Federal Science in the Gilded Age

摘要

Shortly before the nations centennial, the physicist Joseph Henry, long admired abroad as well as at home, a onetime Princeton professor and the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution for a quarter of a century, was stirred to reflect: The surprise is not "that science has made comparatively little advance among us, but that... it should have made so much." A good deal of what Henry noticed arose from the new dispensations for science by the federal government. The federal initiatives had begun in 1862, when the first Civil War Congress passed the Morrill Act, with its grant of lands to the states for colleges and universities that would offer studies in the agricultural and mechanical arts.