THE UTILITY OF SCIENCE 237 



Perhaps this is a Nemesis on the heels of ultra- 

 academic curricula which might have been orien- 

 tated in relation to practical professional problems 

 without any loss in the thoroughness or all-round- 

 ness of the scientific discipline; but the recoil is 

 resulting in a technician who is insufficiently 

 grounded in the principles. 



Students of Science have indeed primarily to 

 do with the kind of investigation whose results 

 Bacon called lucifera, but our point is that this 

 is the surest, and sometimes even the shortest 

 road to that other kind of result which he called 

 fructifera. In one of his lectures Prof. Karl 

 Pearson makes the following impressive statement 

 of his own experience: "I have been engaged for 

 sixteen years in helping to train engineers, and 

 those of my old pupils who are now coming to 

 the front in life are not those who stuck to facts 

 and formulae, and sought only for what they 

 thought would be 'useful to them in their pro- 

 fession.' On the contrary, the lads who paid 

 attention to method, who thought more of proofs 

 than of formulae, who accepted even the special- 

 ized branches of their training as a means of 

 developing habits of observation rather than of 

 collecting 'useful facts,' these lads have developed 

 into men who are succeeding in life. And the 

 reason of this seems to me, when considering 

 their individual cases, to be that they could adapt 



