PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. 23 



War could force us to do nothing we did not possess capacity for 

 before. 



" The potential research worker," says the editor of the 

 United States Experiment Station Record, " is probably less born 

 than made," and Dr. Nutting thus clothes the same thought in 

 different language : 



Fertility of mind is not so m,uch an inborn quality of the mind itself 

 as of the training and association which that mind has had.* 



Hence it is our solemn duty as a young nation to provide 

 abundant facilities at each of our three universities for the 

 making of our future research workers. 



We pass on to speak of industrial research, which always 

 has some utilitarian end in view, whereas the purpose of pure 

 scientific research is more exclusively philosophic — the discovery 

 of truth. The investigator in pure science has been likened to 

 the explorer who discovers new continents, or islands, or lands 

 before unknown; the investigator in industrial research to the 

 pioneer who surveys the newly-discovered land in order to locate 

 its mineral resources, to determine its forest areas, and ascer- 

 tain the position of its arable land.f 



I quote these remarks with all circumspection, for after all 

 there are no sharp boundaries between research in pure science 

 and in applied or industrial science, and Huxley was right when 

 he wrote that " what people call ' applied science ' is nothing 

 but the application of pure science to particular problems." The 

 fact is that applied science is impossible until a foundation of 

 pure science has been laid to build it on. You cannot apply a 

 science which is not there to apply, and, as Sir William Tinney 

 has said, until men began to interrogate nature for the sake of 

 learning her ways, and without concentrating their attention on 

 the expectation of useful applications of such knowledge, little 

 or no progress was made. 



Industrial chemistry has been defined as that branch of 

 chemical science which uses all the rest of chemistry, and much' 

 engineering, for the furtherance of production of chemical sub- 

 stances, or the use of chemical means or methods for manufac- 

 turing any material of commerce ; and hence industrial research 

 for the most part differs widely from university research. True„ 

 there are instances to the contrary : thus Michigan University 

 has at Ann Arbor a tank for testing ship resistance,' and Illinois 

 University has a laboratory for investigations on a full-size loco- 

 motive engine, but industrial research is for the most part im- 

 practicable for universities, and as often as not needs to be 

 carried out under large-scale conditions, as it were in situ, and 

 by persons already possessing practical experience in the various 

 phases of the problem under investigation. At the same time 



* Nature (1917), 100, 157. 



t Col. J. J. Carty: Presidential address: Proc. Amer. Inst. Elec. Engi- 

 neers (1916), 35, [10], 1415. 



