Admitting that an organized association of investigators is of the first necessity to secure the best results in the scientific work of the future, we meet the question of the conditions and auspices under which they are to be brought together. The first thought to strike us at this point may well be that we have, in our great universities, organizations which include most of the leading men now engaged in scientific research, whose personnel and facilities we should utilize. Admitting, as we all do, that there are already too many universities, and that better work would be done by a consolidation of the smaller ones, a natural conclusion is that the end in view will be best reached through existing organizations. But it would be a great mistake to jump at this conclusion without a careful study of the conditions. The brief argument--there are already too many institutions--instead of having more we should strengthen those we have--should not be accepted without examination. Had it been accepted thirty years ago, there are at least two great American universities of to-day which would not have come into being, the means devoted to their support having been divided among others. These are the Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago. What would have been gained by applying the argument in these cases? The advantage would have been that, instead of 146 so-called universities which appear to-day in the Annual Report of the Bureau of Education, we should have had only 144. The work of these 144 would have been strengthened by an addition, to their resources, represented by the endowments of Baltimore and Chicago, and sufficient to add perhaps one professor to the staff of each. Would the result have been better than it actually has been? Have we not gained anything by allowing the argument to be forgotten in the cases of these two institutions? I do not believe that any who carefully look at the subject will hesitate in answering this question in the affirmative. The essential point is that the Johns Hopkins University did not merely add one to an already overcrowded list, but that it undertook a mission which none of the others was then adequately carrying out. If it did not plant the university idea in American soil, it at least gave it an impetus which has now made it the dominant one in the higher education of almost every state. The question whether the country at large would have reaped a greater benefit, had the professors of the University of Chicago, with the appliances they now command, been distributed among fifty or a hundred institutions in every quarter of the land, than it has actually reaped from that university, is one which answers itself. Our two youngest universities have attained success, not because two have thus been added to the number of American institutions of learning, but because they had a special mission, required by the advance of the age, for which existing institutions were inadequate.