656 BACTERIAL DISEASES OF PLANTs| 



Pasteur set an admirable example in this respect, as in 

 many others. He had no confidants. No one outside of his own 

 laboratory, and often not even his assistants, knew what he 

 really thought about a problem until the time was ripe for the 

 announcement of his perfected discovery. No one suffers from 

 such a course because discoveries published in an incomplete 

 form, mixed with various erroneous assumptions incident to the 

 early stages of a research, are seldom very useful. It is better to 

 hold back the report until everything is verified and then so to 

 publish it that the man who has actually made the discoveries 

 shall receive the credit which he deserves, and by it be stimulated 

 to make additional discoveries. It is all the more striking and 

 memorable if these discoveries come like a flash out of a clear sky ! 



This brings us to the obverse side of the shield, which 

 will be considered in the next section. 



ON TEAM W^ORK 



Nothing in the foregoing chapter militates in any w^ay 

 against the association of scientific men and women in small 

 groups for the easier solution of difficult problems. Many com- 

 plex problems can be attacked successfully only in this coopera- 

 tive way, and this has come to be very clearly understood in 

 modern times and is now, I think, rather overdone, there being a 

 disposition in some quarters to consider scientific men as only 

 so many cogs in a mechanism to be run exclusively by a non- 

 scientific director or business man, in the interests of a blear- 

 eyed and jealous god called "Efficiency." The highest efficiency, 

 however, obtains when the non-scientific man does the least 

 meddling. ''The accomplished scholar is not an utensil." 



Such team-problems involve mathematics, chemistry, physical 

 chemistry, physics, and various phases of biology and no one 

 person can be supposed to possess the requisite training in all 

 of these sciences, but several congenial persons by joining forces 

 may succeed unitedly where each would fail separately. I have 

 used the word "congenial" intentionally, for inharmonious 

 natures do not mix any better than oil and water. Not every 

 person is adapted to team work. Indeed, some persons are so 

 suspicious of every one that they are shut into a very little world 



