UNIVERSITY-BUILDING. 335 



research, but wiser men than we have ever known have grown up with- 

 out books. Shakespere had few of them, Lincoln had but few of them, 

 Homer and Jesus, none at all. Books serve no purpose if they are not 

 used. The man who reads it gives the book its life. Specimens are 

 inevitable in natural history. Apparatus is necessary in physical sci- 

 ence. Collections and equipment are really the outgrowth of the men 

 that use them. You can not order them in advance. Professor Haeckel 

 once said bitterly that the results of research in the great laboratories 

 were in inverse proportion to the perfection of their appliances. An 

 investigation may be lost in multiplicity of details or in elaboration of 

 preparation. Some men will spend years in getting a microscope or a 

 microtome just right and then never use it. It is said that the entire 

 outfit of Joseph Leidy, one of the greatest of our microscopists, cost 

 just seventy-five dollars. It was the man and not the equipment that 

 made his investigations luminous. 



Publication is necessa^, but it would be the greatest of mistakes 

 to measure a university by the number of pages printed by its members. 

 Much of the so-called research even in Germany is unworthy of the 

 name of science. Its subject matter is not extension of human experi- 

 ence, but an addition to human pedantry. To count the twists and 

 turns of literary eccentricity may have no more intellectual significance 

 than to count the dead leaves in the forest. Statistical work is justified 

 not by the labor it requires, but by the laws it unveils. Elaboration of 

 method may conceal the dearth of purpose. Moreover, it is easier to 

 string the web of plausibility than to recover the lost clue of truth. Of 

 a thousand doctor's theses each year scarcely a dozen contain a real 

 addition to knowledge. In too many cases a piece of research is simply 

 a bid for notice. American universities are always on the watch for 

 men who can do something as it should be done. Work is often done 

 solely to arrest the attention of the university authorities. A profes- 

 sorship once gained, nothing more is heard of research. The love of 

 novelty with the itch for writing often passes for the power of original 

 research. The fanaticism for veracity has nothing in common with 

 versatile writing or paradoxical cleverness. It took Darwin twenty-five 

 years of the severest work before he could get his own leave to print his 

 own conclusions. Other writers put forth sweeping generalizations as 

 rapidly as their typewriters can take them from dictation. In certain 

 works which have arrested popular attention, the investigations must 

 have gone on at the highest speed attainable by the pen of the gifted 

 author. Such work justifies Fechner's sarcastic phrase, 'cuckoo's eggs 

 laid in the nest of science.' 



The work of science is addressed to science, no matter if half a dozen 

 generations pass before another investigator takes up the thread. The 

 science of the newspapers is of quite another type, and so is much of the 



