Sigma Xi I 251 



culiar. They rest not upon university credits, not upon 

 courses of study as such, least of all upon grades or 

 standings so-called, carried out to any perfection of 

 decimal refinement, but upon the one solitary condition 

 that in your work in the University, your scientific work, 

 you have in the judgment of your instructors given 

 promise of being able presently to guide your own work 

 yourselves; to take up and carry forward on your own 

 account some investigation, some problem which in its 

 completion or solution shall be a contribution to the sum 

 of human knowledge. It is our confidence in your ability 

 and willingness to do this thing that has brought us here 

 face to face this evening. 



The membership in Sigma Xi is then conditioned upon 

 presumed ability to enter upon and carry forward origi- 

 nal scientific research. Such ability, though not always 

 a matter of record on the books of schools and univer- 

 sities, does nevertheless, for its successful exercise, re- 

 quire, in addition to natural endowment, certain high 

 attainments of scholarship and the observance of peculiar 

 definite conditions in themselves sufficiently rigorous and 

 imperative. Research-work is not for the sluggish nor 

 for the ill-informed. No really valuable effort to enlarge 

 our knowledge is accomplished without long preparation 

 and patient unwearying toil. The very first prerequisite 

 is knowledge, knowledge of what has been done by others, 

 especially in the field selected. This, of course, for many 

 reasons, not the least important of which is simply self- 

 protection. Surely no one cares to take up a line of in- 

 vestigation simply to repeat or duplicate the observa- 

 tions and experiences of another, unless, perhaps, by im- 



