4 Transactions of the Royal Canadian Institute 



among the many great names associated with the development of these 

 sciences. I have wished in a few words to do the impossible, to suggest 

 to the layman by an illustration something of the reach and importance 

 of research, to indicate how the work of one research man connects up 

 with that of another and to shadow forth how intimately the life work 

 of some great thinker may be related to our daily life and activities 

 without our being conscious of the fact. Newton himself, it may be 

 pointed out, was not such an unconditioned being that his work was 

 independent of that of the workers who preceded him. The discovery 

 of the calculus was already a foregone conclusion after Descartes had 

 invented analytical geometry. In the hands of a lesser genius, however, 

 its scope would not have been as fully appreciated and immediate results 

 would have been more meagre. I wish that I could convey briefly to 

 the laymen in my audience some conception of the nature of the calculus 

 but this is not within my power to do. That will perhaps not be sur- 

 prising in view of the fact that a hundred lectures are devoted to intro- 

 ducing the honours students in mathematics and physics to the subject 

 in their second year and that a considerable portion of their time in 

 their third and fourth years is utilized in increasing their appreciation 

 of its scope and application. 



In the foregoing I have said nothing about the immense contribu- 

 tions of chemistry to the health, wealth and comfort of mankind. I 

 have not referred to the debt we owe to biology, botany, bacteriology, 

 geology, and various other branches of science. I have pointed out the 

 successive dependence of one man's work on another's. I would draw 

 attention also to the simultaneous co-operative character of scientific 

 work. For hundreds of research workers in different parts of the world 

 are at the same time busied on the same problems or on related prob- 

 lems. They keep in touch with one another's work principally through 

 highly specialized journals which the layman never sees. In these 

 journals as a rule the results of their investigations are published. To 

 expedite matters it has been found necessary to devise certain aids. 

 One of these is the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature 

 which, before the war, appeared annually in seventeen volumes, each 

 volume corresponding to a separate branch of science. Besides an 

 alphabetical list of authors each volume contains an elaborately classified 

 subject index. This, however, in view of the mass of material being 

 turned out, does not suffice for the needs of the research worker who 

 wants speedy orientation with regard to everything which may have a 

 bearing on his own special line of work. For this something more than 

 a mere classification of titles is needed. Some further indication as to 

 the contents of an article is necessary. The need here referred to is 



