January 12, 191 1] 



NATURE 



357 



service. I have tried to help others to opportunities I 

 could not use myself. I have been glad to do this, because 

 that which I might have done has been far more than 

 balanced by the help I have been able to give to others. 



But it is not clear that this greater help has led to 

 greater achievement. I cannot find that the output bears 

 any direct relation to the means for producing it. The 

 man who is born to zeal for experiment or observation 

 cannot be put down. He is always at it. Somewhere or 

 somehow he will come to his own. No man ever adds 

 much to the sum of human knowledge because the road 

 is made easy for him. Leisure, salar>', libraries, 

 apparatus, problems, appreciation, none of these will 

 make an investigator out of a man who is willing to be 

 4mything else. There is human nature among scientific 

 0ien, and human nature is prone to follow the lines of 

 least resistance. It takes originality, enthusiasm, abound- 

 ing life, to turn any man from what is easily known to 

 that tvhich is knowable only through the sweat of the 

 intellect. Of all the men I have tried to train in biolog\', 

 those five I regard as ablest because their contributions to 

 science have been greatest, were brought up out of doors 

 or within bare walls in which books, specimens, and equip- 

 ment were furnished from the scant salary. .A struggling 

 teacher, a ver}- young teacher at that, at 1800 dollars per 

 year, and 10 per cent, of this for a biological library, is 

 not a condition to attract advanced students to-day, but, 

 so far as my own experience has gone, I have never 

 known stronger students than those who came to me to 

 be trained under these pinching conditions. 



To-day the conditions are adjusted to the promotion of 

 the docile student rather than the man of original force. 

 He goes, not to the man, but to the university. He finds 

 "work in biology no longer a bit of green sod urtder the 

 blue sky shut off by conventional and ugly hedges, and 

 therefore to be acquired at any cost. It is a park, open 

 n e\ery side to anybody. Or, dropping the poor meta- 

 phor, he finds his favourite work not a single hard- 

 won opportunity in a mass of required language and 

 mathematics. He finds the university like a great hotel 

 with a menu so varied that he is lost in the abundance. 

 His favourite zoology or botany is not taught by a man. 

 It is divided into a dozen branches, each taught by an 

 Instructor who is a cogwheel in the machine. The master 

 under whom he would seek inspiration is busy with the 

 planning of additional cogwheels or the oiling of the 

 machinery. Or, more often, there is no master teacher 

 tt all. The machinery is there and at his hand. He has 

 •ut to touch the button and he has alcohol, formal, 

 xylol, or Canada balsam — whatever he needs for his pre- 

 isent work. Every usable drug and every usable instru- 

 ment is on tap ; all we need, degrees and all, are made 

 for us in Germany. Another button will bring him all 

 the books of all the ages, all the records of past experi- 

 ence, carrying knowledge far ahead of his present require- 

 ments, usually beyond his possible acquirements. The 

 touch of personality, the dash of heredity, is lost. 



Worse than all this, for the student who is worth while 

 will orient himself even among the most elaborate appli- 

 ances and the most varied concourse of elective, is the 

 fact that he is set to acquire training without enthusiasm. 

 Sooner or later he receives a fellowship in some institu- 

 tion which is not the one to which he wishes to go. 

 Virtually, he finds himself hired to work in some par- 

 ticular place not under the man, of all men, he has chosen 

 to know. He is given some petty problem ; it seems petty 

 to him and to others. He takes this as his major, with 

 two convenient minors, and at last he is turned out with 

 Tiis degree to find his own life, if he can, with his degree. 

 His next experience is to starve, and he is not so well 

 fitted for this as he would have been had he begun it 

 sooner. If he finds himself among facilities for work, he 

 w'ill starve physically only. If he marries, he starves in 

 good company, but more rapidly and under greater stress. 

 Tf chance throws him into a college without facilities, he 

 will starve mentally also. In any case, he will lament 

 the fact that the university has given him so much 

 material help, so little personal inspiration, and at the 

 end values its product so low, that with all the demands 

 of scholarship and scholarly living his pay is less than 

 that of the bricklayer or the hack driver; for he has 



NO. 2150, VOL. 85] 



attained a degree of scholarship without a corresponding 

 degree of compelling force. His education has not given 

 him mastery of men, because its direction has not been 

 adequately his own. 



It is always the struggle which gives strength. Learn- 

 ing or polish may be gained in other ways, but without 

 self-directed effort there is not much intellectual virility. 

 Good pay, like some other good things, comes to the man 

 who compels it. To make oneself indispensable, real, 

 forceful, with a many-sided interest in men as well as in 

 specialised learning, is the remedy for low salaries. As 

 college men, we get all that we are worth on the average. 

 Our fault is that we are in the average. We need more 

 individuality. 



In so far as the universities can remedy this, it would 

 lie in the encouragement of men to take their advanced 

 work in actual centres of inspiration. No one university 

 has many such. Let the fellowships lead men to the few. 

 Or let them be travelling fellowships, available at the 

 best centres of inspiration in this or any other country. 

 Or, if the choice among departments be too delicate a 

 matter for university officials to undertake, let the dis- 

 tribution of fellowships be confined to the men who already 

 are on the ground. These men, in one way or another, 

 have shown their confidence, have chosen their master. 

 If the university wishes now to smooth their path to 

 success, it could give pecuniar}- assistance without hiring 

 them to go where they do not wish to go. There is no 

 nobler ambition for a great investigator than to hope from 

 a school of science to continue his own kind, by his own 

 method, his own inspiration, the contagion of his own 

 love of knowledge. In no way can this be done save by 

 letting like come to like, by opening the way from his 

 own kind to find the way to their master. In this our 

 present fellowshipr system is failing, and this failure is 

 showing itself in the cheapening of virility and the 

 cheapening of originality among our doctors of philosophy 

 as compared with our young workers of a generation ago. 

 An eminent teacher of physics said lately : — 

 " The numbers of doctors' degrees in -physics bear no 

 relation to the eminence of the professors who grant them. 

 They depend soleh' on the number of fellowships offered, 

 on the number of assistantships available. In the institu- 

 tion which has conferred the greatest number in recent 

 years, almost every one of these is draw-n by the stipend 

 offered ; scarcely one by the unquestioned greatness of the 

 leading professor." 



The primary fault seems to be in our conception of 

 research, which tends to point in the direction of pedantry 

 rather than that of scholarship. Not all professors have 

 this tendency, only those who are neither great scholars 

 nor great teachers. It is, or ought to be, a maxim of 

 education that advanced work in any subject has greater 

 value to the student, as discipline or as information, than 

 elementary work. Thoroughness and breadth of know- 

 ledge give strength of mind and better perspective. They 

 give, above all, courage and enthusiasm. With each 

 vear, up to a certain point, our universities carry their 

 sfudies further toward these ends, and the student responds 

 to each demand made on his intelligence and his 

 enthusiasm. 



Then research begins, and here the teacher, as a matter 

 of duty, transforms himself into the pedant. Instead of 

 a closer contact with nature and her problems, the student 

 is side-tracked into some corner in which numerical exact- 

 ness is possible, even though no possible truth can be 

 drawn from the multiplicity of facts which may be 

 gathered. 



This sort of research, recently satirised by Prof. Grant 

 Showerman in the Atlantic Monthly, is not advanced work 

 at all. It may be most elementary. The student of the 

 grammar school can count the pebbles in a gravel bank 

 to see what percentage of them lie with the longest axis 

 horizontal as easily as the master can do it. That is not 

 research in geology, however great the pains which may 

 be taken to ensure accuracy. The student may learn 

 something. All contact with gravel teaches something of 

 the nature of rocks, as all reading of Plautus teaches 

 something of poetry ; all contact with realities gives some 

 reality as a result. Yet there is no result involved in the 

 case above indicated in the investigation itself. We know 



