54 Research and National Purpose 



terminated by a massive invasion, as might indeed well have 

 occurred in the thirteenth century when the Mongols began 

 scorching the earth. However, the two characteristics highly 

 important for science, namely a deep interest in both practical 

 and philosophical affairs, made evident on the one hand by 

 the remarkable successes in temperate climate agriculture 

 which permitted the establishment of urban communities and 

 in the other by the establishment of the universities, were 

 highly developed well before the Crusades. By the time the 

 great books of Alexandrian science were turned over to Euro- 

 pean society in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the ground 

 was not only fertile for absorbing them but for transmuting 

 them into tools which would eventually be able to add fuel to 

 the Industrial Revolution. 



If we examine our national history relative to 

 Our National that of Europe, we have to admit that we have 

 Attitude had relative blindness on one side. We com- 



pletely shared the European's respect for prac- 

 tical innovation. We were not only excellent at developing new 

 useful devices but in turning the techniques of the Industrial 

 Revolution over to the mass production of such devices in 

 ways which the Europeans are only now beginning to emulate. 

 On the other hand, our society showed relatively little general 

 sympathy for cultural or philosophical matters, at least until 

 World War II and its aftermath. Such areas of human endeavor 

 were regarded as somewhat peripheral to our national mission 

 until quite recently. Had European science been arrested in 

 the eighteenth century after the time of Newton for some rea- 

 son, the torch would not have been kept burning brightly on 

 this side of the Atlantic. It probably would have done no more 

 than glimmer in occasional recesses. It is true that agricultural 

 research has been supported in the United States at the Federal 

 level for about a century; however, the fact that we were so 

 predominantly agrarian until this century shows that the sup- 

 port of agricultural biology was given with quite obviously 

 practical goals in view. 



