DISCUSSION AND CORRESPOXDEXCE 267 



(all without exception previously recorded) and in the full belief 

 that he was adding to the store of human knowledge. I gave him 

 books and references trying to lead him to master all the known 

 facts about the plants and insects he was studying alone. With 

 what result? His interest rapidly waned. Toward the end of the 

 year he remarked that " there didn't seem to be any use trying to 

 discover new things for everything was already discovered." 



It was a clear case of a genuine original interest drained away by 

 the over-stimulation of ambition which a previous teacher had 

 created; of a bright mind that properly led in the beginning to love 

 knowledge for its own sake might have accomplished at twenty the 

 immature and abortive desires of ten. 



Though this is an extreme case, I have seen the same in scores of 

 other children (to a less degree) and young people whose teachers 

 had trained them in the Agassiz method. 



I made my statement in its pedagogical application because experi- 

 ence has shown me that if you mean to build solidly for the advance- 

 ment of science you must build on what is already known; and the 

 only people who have ever advanced it are the people who " know the 

 literature." Those unrecognized unappreciated " geniuses," cold- 

 shouldered by an envious world, who have to induce nice, rich, old 

 ladies to build them private laboratories that they may give unheard 

 of discoveries to a startled public usually end just there — with un- 

 heard of discoveries. As vide Keely, of motor fame, and many others 

 now living. 



It is a plain cold provable fact that the man who does not, or will 

 not, or cannot find out what others have done on a subject before he 

 goes plunging ahead on his own account — who does not " know his 

 literature " down to bed rock — has hardly the ghost of a chance of 

 making his standing in the scientific world of today. 



Of course if your aim is merely to produce a gilded science youth, 

 a dilettante and a loiterer, say so and be done with it. But if you 

 are training minds for the advancement of science then you must 

 put them on the main road from the beginning. And I contend 

 that a youth whose observation has been trained as part and parcel 

 of the habit of verifying the work of others has at twenty a poten- 

 tiality for ultimate success far and away beyond that of a youth who 

 has been trained to depend on his own discoveries, even though some 

 by a happy chance may be new. 



The sole value that can be urg^ed in behalf of the discover- for-vour- 

 self method, which is the Agassiz method, is that it develops self- 

 dependence and at a fearsome price. It is the method for the few 

 who are able to survive it. not for the many: for the child of the 

 visual mind type, not for the oral or motor. 



