GENERAL OBSERVATIONS : BEGINNING WORK THOUGHTLESSLY 639 



cies, as nearly as may be, and thereby wins a battle or a cam- 

 paign. The commander who cannot afford the time, or who 

 lacks the foresight and the acumen, is beaten and disgraced. 

 You have your choice. But what profit a student thinks he 

 will derive from a blundering course of experimentation ending in 

 some dead end or no thoroughfare, I cannot imagine. Your 

 results, you may be sure, will not be commensurate with your 

 labors. "Palma non sine pulvere." Yes, but Seneca is careful 

 to add "per viam rectam. " You may flounder through the mud 

 and dust desperately, but if you are on the wrong road all of your 

 energy will not save you. 



Literature is full of examples of this sort of bungling, espe- 

 cially Theses, which once printed have to be read but which really 

 have no raison d'etre, since often they do not add materially 

 either to human knowledge or to the reputation of the writers. 

 Sit down, therefore, with your problem and think it over 

 seriously in all its various aspects before you attempt a stroke of 

 work. The more thought you put upon it in advance the more 

 likely you will be to obtain convincing results when you actually 

 begin to experiment. Here I cannot resist telling an old story. 

 An Irishman invented a cumbrous cover to keep water out of a 

 gig in case of sudden rains while on the road, which cover, he said, 

 was to be stored away underneath the gig in clear weather. 

 "But there is no room for it underneath," said a critic. As this 

 was only too evident, Pat was nonplussed for a moment and then 

 replied, '^Well, you can leave it at home." This is hke many a 

 human cogitation! Tried out it does not work! 



I am not attacking any one. Some of my own experiments 

 have been of this sort, but fewer I trust in recent years than 

 earlier. Now I always spend more time, often very much more, 

 thinking over my proposed experiments, than I do in the per- 

 formance of them. And generally speaking, I know in advance, 

 barring some unforeseen contingency, just how they are coming 

 out. If they fail, I begin to search shamefacedly for that 

 something which I have overlooked, and sometimes it turns out, 

 when discovered, to be as plain as the nose on a man's face, or as 

 the bilateral symmetry of the fish. 



