RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS IN PURE SCIENCE 57 



time vivacious, convincing, and dependable, by persons who have merely 

 " read up " on biology with nothing but an elementary training to 

 start from. Only persons constantly occupied with the first-hand gath- 

 ering of data, with the making and testing of hypotheses, and with the 

 submitting of results and conclusions to fellow workers for criticism 

 and verification, can do the safest teaching in these ways. 



Here comes not only the opportunity but the obligation of those 

 whose vocation is in research institutions. The university teacher may 

 generally be considered to have done his share when in addition to his 

 research work he has instructed his regular classes. Those, on the 

 other hand, whose lots are cast in institutions of research, being re- 

 lieved of the round of duties incident to the university professorship, 

 would seem to be marked as the ones to use such instruments of gen- 

 eral education as are most suitable for reaching the great public outside 

 the schools and colleges. The press, as already said, is probably the 

 most available and powerful of all such instrumentalities. 



I would not be understood to mean that every person regularly em- 

 ployed by institutions of research in non-industrial science should be 

 held responsible for a certain amount of popular writing or lecturing or 

 arranging of collections or the like. Such an idea put into practise 

 would undoubtedly carry disaster in its train not alone to the institu- 

 tions, but to the cause designed to be promoted. My view is that these 

 institutions, as institutions, ought to hold themselves obliged, from 

 time to time, to give out in a form readily accessible to and compre- 

 hensible by the rank and file, the results of their most significant 

 achievements. Indeed, I am willing to go a step farther and say that 

 such institutions might well be held to something of the sort by their 

 boards of administration. I am persuaded that such a course would be, 

 in the long run, not only not obstructive, but actually promotive, of the 

 work of investigation itself. 



It is true something in this way is being done by some, possibly all, 

 of the research foundations of the country. But in very few, if any, so 

 far as I can judge, is the doing accepted as a weighty obligation and as 

 a set policy. So it happens that what is done is an exceedingly small 

 fraction of what ought to be and might be done. 



Under its present management the Marine Biological Station of San 

 Diego holds duties in this direction to be as incumbent upon it as are 

 those of making discoveries about the Pacific Ocean and the things that 

 live in it. 



