72 Britain's Heritage of Science 



CHAPTER III 



(Physical Science) 



THE NON-ACADEMIC HERITAGE 

 during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 



THE scientific investigator should be endowed with 

 knowledge, critical judgment, and inventive power. 

 For the first two attributes we must look mainly to pro- 

 fessional men, who have gone through a recognized training 

 and are engaged in teaching or research. Such men, brought 

 up under the compelling influence of accepted currents of 

 thought, though well prepared to advance their subject 

 and even to make new discoveries along the paths opened 

 out by their predecessors, are heavily handicapped when 

 the time has come for a revolution of fundamental ideas. 

 Often they have risen to the occasion, and thrown anti- 

 quated doctrines overboard, but sometimes the academic 

 tradition is strong enough to prevail. The advantage, then, 

 lies with those who are not burdened by the weight of 

 inherited opinions, and great opportunities are offered to 

 the inexperienced youth or the enthusiastic amateur. What 

 constitutes an amateur ? All efforts to define the term 

 must fail, because we cannot define what is not definite. 

 The word in its literal sense denotes a man who pursues 

 a subject for the love of it, but it carries a suggestion of weak- 

 ness, or rather a suspicion, associated more particularly 

 with amateurs in art, that they have not completely mastered 

 their craft. So far as the actual work of research is con- 

 cerned the difference between the amateur and professional 

 man is not always pronounced, and is frequently obliterated ; 

 some University professors have retained through life the 

 characteristic attributes of free lances of science, and 



