THE MAN OF SCIENCE IN PRACTICAL AFFAIRS. 491 



man who knows, the man of scientific training, from his fair share 

 of public responsibility, we should do well to call him into service 

 more and more. He may be, he often is, averse to administrative 

 work, for the reason that it interferes with his chosen occupation, 

 and hinders the prosecution of research. But his training and his 

 mental bias are both needed in public affairs, wherein the scientfic 

 method is too often unapplied. In European countries men of high 

 scientific rank are frequently found in legislative bodies and minis- 

 tries; men like Playfair, Roscoe, and Lubbock in England, Yir- 

 chow in Germany, Quintino Sella in Italy, and Berthelot in France. 

 With us in America the maker of speeches outranks the thinker 

 in popular esteem, and is given duties to perform in which he may 

 become ridiculous. Both in legislation and in diplomacy many 

 questions arise which demand the most careful scientific treatment, 

 or which can be answered only by thorough scientific knowledge, 

 and many of these have been intrusted for settlement to men of 

 no specific training whatever. Of late years we have had the 

 fur-seal controversy, the question of forest reserves, the irrigation 

 of our arid lands, problems of sanitation and water supply, and in 

 each of these the man of science has played a part which was too 

 often subordinate to that of the politician. In an ideal government 

 the two should work together, each suj^plementing the peculiar 

 ability of the other. Many details of the tariff, and a notable part 

 of the coinage question, require scientific data for their proper 

 settlement, but the true expert has not always been consulted. The 

 result of this neglect is sometimes seen in courts of law, where ques- 

 tions of interpretation arise which might have been averted, obscu- 

 rity in legislation being often due to the careless use of scientific 

 terminology or to ignorance of the relations in science between two 

 branches of industry. The voice of the trained investigator might 

 well be heard in Congress, but his testimony now is limited to the 

 committee room. Even there it is received with an attention which 

 is too often mingled with incredulity. The myth of the dreamer, 

 the visionary, is more than half believed. 



The supposed type, then, is not a type, but an exception — a man 

 of straw, which is hardly worth overthrowing. But the belief in 

 it has been and still is mischievous, a hindrance to wise action, an 

 obstacle to progress. The misconception has worked injury to 

 science. These words of protest, therefore, are not wholly super- 

 fluous. 



