But such has not been the history of all the technical sciences. In some cases a highly developed art long preceded the applied science. Iron and steel were made ages before the science of chemistry was founded. We make no better iron to-day than did the barbarians long ago; but, so soon as there were the sciences of chemistry and metallurgy, the art immediately expanded. The making of iron and steel is still an art; but not until science came to its help was it possible to have steel rails spanning the continent or iron ships crossing the sea.

The marvellous growth in our industries has been correlated with that of our colleges and universities. It has been a mutual growth. Neither could have so developed alone. The universities have been the leaders in the sense that science has been developed in them, and from them is diffused outward among the people and downward into the intermediate and primary schools, and even below.

The fountain-head of the applied sciences is the university, with its departments of engineering, chemistry, agriculture, biology, and the various courses in pure science and technical studies. When I entered Yale as a student, forty-seven years ago, instruction in the applied sciences was but just beginning in a few of the more progressive schools. Now there is not a State in the Union without colleges with their departments of technical science, and where there are not extensive facilities for both the advance of the physical sciences and instruction in their technical applications.

So it must and will be in respect to this new department of social science. Charities and correction have been practised as arts from the dawn of civilization. Now we are just beginning to study them by scientific methods. To a limited extent as good success may attend this work, prosecuted purely as an art, and guided by sentiments of humanity, as will be done by the aid of science, just as the Damascus blade was purely a work of art, and science has not improved it. But, just as the art which made that sword could not furnish the material for the stupendous structures of our modern times, so the old methods of dispensing charity and managing the delinquent cannot successfully deal with the enormous demands of the present day in these matters. Formerly the poor and unfortunate perished by thousands from neglect and pestilence, and multitudes of criminals were executed. Now they are preserved and accumulate, until the burden and expense are among the most serious our present civilization has to bear.

The efficient and economical management of charities and correction on the scale we have now to deal with must be conducted as an applied science, founded on natural laws.

In the development of this new science the universities and their professors can aid. But, as an applied science, you, not the professors, are in charge of the laboratories where the material operated. upon exists, and where the observations go on and are recorded. The various organizations for dispensing charity, the schools for instructing the neglected and defective, the places of correction, are all laboratories of investigation in this new science.

Charity is the lowest section of this department. It began with humanity itself, and its work has been the most widely and most crudely carried on. But it is by no means the simplest, although

some of its results under crude methods have been brilliant as well as beneficent. But it never before was conducted on such a stupendous scale nor under such social and political conditions as now, nor where misdirection would produce such wide-spread evils. It must be directed along lines marked by the fixed laws of nature, that the lower strata of mankind may be bettered as well as helped; that the instinct of charity may not by perversion become a curse to the race, increasing its lower stratum at the expense of the better part of mankind.

The newer and better method can best be brought about by the co-operation of the universities with the workers in the field. You are now doing much more than we are; but I believe and trust that the time is near when our aid in your work will be as great as it has been in the material industries,—when we can and shall help you as truly as we do now the machinist, the manufacturer, the farmer, and the stock-breeder.

And this last term suggests another thought, because in my professional work I have given much study to it. Stock-breeding is one of our greatest industries, and thousands of millions of capital are invested in it. It supplies a very large percentage of the food of the civilized world. For ages it was successfully practised as an art merely, but of late, under the influence of biological science, has had a new impulse, and with wonderful results. With a better knowledge of the laws of heredity, our flocks and herds have increased enormously in numbers, but even more in excellence. Our horses are swifter, our sheep better woolled, our beef more

tender and quicker grown, our milk richer and more economically produced. As a result, we are better clothed, and the tables of all the people, from the richest to the poorest, better supplied. This has come about by a better knowledge of the laws of heredity; and year by year we hear more and more of the relation of heredity to the classes of society you are dealing with. As applied to the breeding of our domestic animals, we have laws formulated and reasonably well understood. And these same laws apply to mankind. As regards the defective, the matter is already well understood by the expert. As I listened to your discussions over the feeble-minded and the sad facts relating to their origin, I was impressed anew by the facts you stated.

There are breeds of men as truly as there are breeds of horses; and much, if not indeed most, of your work relates to the care and training of the poorer breeds of mankind. Of the ninety-six thousand idiots and feeble-minded in our country, an enormous proportion are so by heredity, have been bred so from idiotic and weak-minded parents. It is not an uncommon thing in our poorhouses to find idiot paupers of two, three, and even four generations' growth. A wider diffusion of scientific knowledge and a more enlightened public sentiment will greatly reduce their number in the coming century. So, too, of our criminals; several factors are involved, of which heredity is one. We are not obliged to keep a standing army to protect us from a foreign foe; but we have an ever-present foe at home, which costs us more than any foreign one. Because of crime, we have to maintain a great standing army of police, with the incident courts and places of punishment, all of which are enormously expensive. Our charities and corrections cost us much more than war; and, under our present system, or rather practice,- for we have no system, it is increasing so rapidly that, if it continues, it will swamp our civilization.

If the cost of crime, pauperism, and the care of the defective continues to increase (as it has of late) in a greater ratio than does the population, it is simply a question of time before the one will overtake the other. This is a mathematical certainty; and it means that, unless stopped, it is sure to become a greater burden than even our prosperous civilization can bear.

This increase will only be checked by a more rational and scientific treatment of the problem. The methods must be scientific in

their principles, and must look to prevention rather than cure. In this we can learn a lesson from the history of public sanitation.

I have long been a student in sanitary science, and for twentythree years been on health boards, and for the latter half of that time one of the managers of our county temporary home for neglected children. There are many points of resemblance between the application of sanitary science and this new science which is now just coming into shape.

Public sanitation has been practised from remote antiquity, and a sanitary code was promulgated along with a criminal code in the laws of Moses. But it has done its greatest work, had its grandest triumphs, and been most beneficial to the race only during the last few years, and since there has been a sanitary science pursued and studied for its own sake, with its laboratories for investigation and its trained investigators, they have discovered the causes of pestilential disease, and evolved the laws on which the practice and methods of public sanitation are now founded. Until this was done there had been but little advance made since the days of Moses. Now pestilence has been robbed of its terrors, not by the cure of disease, but by its prevention.

So it will be in charities and correction.

Prevention rather than

cure must be the leading aim. Vicious instincts must be controlled by beginning with the young, charity lessened by making men more efficient and self-reliant, and reform, not vengeance, be the leading idea in our prisons. This will surely come when our charitable and penal institutions come under the domain of science, when we would no more think of paying political debts by making the political "heeler" warden of a prison or keeper of an almshouse than we would think of putting him on a locomotive to run that, or choose him to plan and lay out a railroad.

In this direction public opinion must be educated. There must be a popular demand, founded on knowledge, that our charitable and penal institutions be conducted on scientific principles, as well as guided by religion and humanity. With the aid of the universities in formulating the laws and training students in the theories involved, I believe that the time is rapidly coming when these public institutions will be in the hands of trained experts, and the practice of public charity and correction, like that of public sanitation, be an applied science, and all our universities will have departments of instruction devoted to it, as some few are already beginning to have.

VII.

The Feeble-minded.

THE FEEBLE-MINDED.

BY GEORGE H. KNIGHT, M.D., LAKEVILLE, CONN.

For the past ten years the status of the work accomplished, the methods used, the reforms advocated for the care and training of the feeble-minded, have been as familiar to the members of this Conference as have those of any other charity or reform which have been brought before us for help, encouragement, suggestion, or advancement.

You are so familiar with our statistics that you are not startled by the fact that, while the Census of 1880 showed that there were 76,000 feeble-minded persons in the United States, the Census of 1890 shows nearly 96,000,- an average increase of 2,000 a year for ten years, of which in actual numbers only about 6,500 are cared for in private or public institutions. This makes an average which seems discouragingly small until we recall the fact that the belief has been general until within a few years that persons of feeble mind were both useless and harmless.

We have no record whatever of any sustained effort in behalf of the idiot, or imbecile, until the year 1800, when a small beginning was made in France. And, now that the Conference is here upon Connecticut soil, it may not be amiss to state, with pride in the fact, that the first steps taken in America in behalf of the imbecile were taken right here in our sister city of Hartford, when as early as 1818 a few children of feeble mind were cared for, taught, and, it is needless to state, improved in the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb. Massachusetts led in establishing the first institution devoted especially to the feeble-minded; and, while it is not literally true, as we wish it were, that others have followed from Maine to California,