INTRODUCTION 3 



which the full report appears. A considerable number of journals 

 devoted solely to reviewing the newer developments in particular fields 

 of science have sprung up in the past twenty-five years; some of these 

 are Physiological Reviews, Quarterly Review of Biology, Nutrition Re- 

 vieivs, Annual Review of Biochemistiy and Recent Progress in Vitamins 

 and Hormones. The new fact or theory thus becomes widely known 

 through publication in the appropriate professional journal and by 

 reference in abstract and review journals and eventually may become a 

 sentence or two in a textbook. 



The professional societies of zoologists and the various special 

 branches of zoology have annual meetings at which new discoveries may 

 be reported. Two of the largest annual meetings are those of the Ameri- 

 can Institute of Biological Sciences and the Federation of American 

 Societies for Experimental Biology. There are, in addition, national and 

 international gatherings, called symposia, of specialists in a given field 

 to discuss the newer findings and the present status of the knowledge in 

 that field. For example, the discussions of the Cold Spring Harbor 

 Symposia in Quantitative Biology, held each June at the Long Island 

 Biological Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, are published and provide 

 an excellent review of some particular field. A different subject is dis- 

 ctxssed each year. 



2. The Scientific Method 



The ultimate aim of each science is to reduce the apparent complex- 

 ity of natural phenomena to simple, fimdamental ideas and relations, to 

 discover all of the facts, and the relationships among them. The 

 Danish physicist Niels Bohr puts it this way, "the task of science is both 

 to extend the range of our experience and to reduce it to order." There 

 is, however, no single "scientific method," no regular, infallible sequence 

 of events which will reveal scientific truths. Different scientists go about 

 their work in different ways. George Sarton, in the Study of the History 

 of Science, points out that "Even as all kinds of men are needed to build 

 up a community, even so we need all kinds of scientists to develop 

 science in e\'ery possible direction. Some are very sharp and narrow- 

 minded, others broad-minded and superficial. Many scientists, like 

 Hannibal, know how to conquer, but not ho^\• to use their victories. 

 Others are colonizers rather than explorers. Others are pedagogues. 

 Others want to measure everything more accurately than it was measured 

 before. This may lead them to the making of fundamental discoveries, 

 or they may fail, and be looked upon as insufferable pedants." 



The ultimate source of all the facts of science is careful, close 

 observation and experiment, free of bias and done as quantitatively as 

 possible. The observations or experiments may then be analyzed, or 

 simplified into their constituent parts, so that some sort of order can be 

 brought into the observed phenomena. Then the parts can be reassem- 

 bled and their interactions made clear. On the basis of these observa- 

 tions, the scientist constructs a hypothesis, a trial idea about the nature 

 of the observation, or about the connections between a chain of events. 



