12 CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON. 



one may say that the Institution is neither a college, nor a uni- 

 versit}^ nor a museum, nor a library, nor an intelligence office. 

 Neither is it a disbursing agency awaiting suggestions for appli- 

 cations of its income; nor is it a bureau for the perfection and 

 promotion of inventions or for the exploitation of monopolies of 

 any sort. The Institution is rather an establishment for the 

 conduct and for the promotion of original research, the results 

 of which are given freely to the world without restrictions 

 implied by letters-patent and without privileges derived from 

 copyrights. But while this positive definition, adopted essen- 

 tially at the foundation of the Institution, has been thus far 

 closely adhered to, the necessit}^ for the negative definitions 

 cited has not sensibly diminished. Indeed, there is a constantly 

 recurring proclivity to reverse the signs of these definitions and 

 hence to prolong indefinitely the more voluminous but generally 

 fruitless parts of the Institution's correspondence. This latter 

 continues to furnish daily an overabundance, especially, of evi- 

 dence that the distinctions between invention and investigation 

 and between education and research are rarely perceived and more 

 rarelj'' applied. 



So many of the multifarious implications of these distinctions, 

 which serve to differentiate the Institution from other organiza- 

 tions, have been considered in previous reports that mere allusion 

 to them may suffice here. It is more important in this connec- 

 tion to offer an answer to the underlying question perennially 

 put direct^ and indirectly to the Institution, namely, ^'What is 

 research?" The answer to this question is contained in the 

 answer to the larger question, " What is science? " ; for, as indicated 

 in an earlier section of this report, the methods of research are 

 the methods of science. The meaning of this much used and 

 much misused term is now well defined. It wa.s established dur- 

 ing the last half of the nineteenth century, although in common 

 parlance it may still mean anything from ^^ skill in boxing" to the 

 prediction of solar and lunar eclipses. In a summary way science 

 presents itself under three distinct stages, to wit : ( 1) the elementary 

 stage of observation and experiment, or the fact-gathering stage; 

 (2) the secondary stage of comparison, measurement, and calcu- 

 lation, or the statistical stage; (3) the stage of correlation under 

 theory with capacity for prediction. But within the limits of 



