CHAPTER X 



THE NATURE AND MEANING OF 

 SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH J 



There is an exhortation, supposedly epitomizing the wis- 

 dom of practical life: "Don't waste your time speculating 

 on why black hens lay white eggs. Get the egg. " This is, 

 perhaps, good advice in business affairs, and appeals to 

 many as a sensible doctrine. Yet the most cursory survey 

 of the progress of civilization will show that the men, who 

 have done most for the world in a practical way, have often 

 been those who have speculated on just such problems and 

 who have solved them. To-day, the man who gets the most 

 eggs is he who in breeding and rearing his poultry follows 

 the methods established by the scientific study of heredity, 

 of selection, and of general physiology. And it is worth 

 remembering that the workers who established the more 

 important of these facts, were not lured to their work by the 

 prospect of financial gain, but grappled with scientific 

 problems because of a conviction that knowledge of such 

 matters was worth while, and in the long run indispensable 

 to human welfare. 



If we analyze the getting of eggs, as it goes on in the 

 varied activities of our modern world, we find that industry 

 is everywhere rooted in the facts of science. Not uncom- 

 monly, whole fields of commercial enterprise go back to 

 some simple but fundamental scientific generalization. 

 Thus, the canning industry is founded upon what the biolo- 

 gist terms biogenesis or the fact that no life arises save from 

 preexisting life. Since putrefaction is an incident of the 



1 The material which appears in this chapter is substantially the same as that 

 used in a lecture at Oberlin College in January, 1913, and later published in the 

 American Museum Journal, Vol. XVIII, No. 7, 1918. 



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