Of the many physical laboratories which have arisen in American universities through private munificence since the time when, fifty years ago, Joseph Henry, Barnard, Draper, Andrew White, and other American scientists started the great movement for higher research in science, there may be mentioned, as an illustration, the Johns Hopkins physical laboratory, the Jefferson laboratory at Harvard, the Sloan laboratory at Yale, the Fayerweather laboratory at Columbia, or the Ryerson laboratory at the University of Chicago. Similar research facilities in other departments of physical science have been presented to American universities by the public-spirited men of the United States. But nothing has illustrated so well the possibilities of intelligent public interest in and generosity to science as the rapid rise of organized American science in the last twenty-five years, culminating in the organization of the National Research Council. To an untrained eye, necessarily looking at scientific things from a superficial view-point, the National Research Council will appear as a splendid institution organized as our third arm of national defense, an indispensable supplement to the Army and Navy. This conception is perfectly natural, because the time and the conditions which called the Council into existence during the World War were such as to demand immediate scientific efforts for national defense. Other somewhat similar organized efforts were made at that time, but those organizations disappeared into thin air as soon as the armistice of 1918 was signed. The National Research Council did not disappear; it is stronger to-day than ever before, because, although designed to be an effective weapon in times of war, it is fundamentally an instrument of peace. Another superficial view will reveal the National Research Council as a splendid organization for the cultivation of an intimate relationship between abstract science and the industries. This also is as it should be; national defense in its broadest sense demands such co-operation. But both these aspects of the Council, prominent aspects to the superficial observer, reveal only the purely material gains to accrue to this country from the Council’s activities. The anxious question will therefore be: What contributions will this organized scientific activity make to the spiritual welfare of the country?