NATURE 



241 



THURSDAY, JANUARY 12, 1899. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF RESEARCH. 

 The Discharge of Electricity through Gases. By Prof. 

 J. J. Thomson, D.Sc, F.R.S. Pp. 203. (Westminster ; 

 Archibald Constable and Co., 1898.) 



THIS work is an expansion of a series of lectures 

 delivered at the University of Princeton, New 

 Jersey, U.S.A., in October 1896. This practice of the 

 American universities of inviting distinguished authorities 

 to deliver courses of lectures is an admirable one. Lord 

 Kelvin's Baltimore lectures were delivered under similar 

 auspices, and it is to be hoped that the promised public- 

 ation of these most interesting lectures will soon take 

 place. By thus bringing our greatest living authorities 

 into personal relations with the staff and students of a 

 university an energetic stimulus is given to their studies 

 and investigations. It might be said that the local staff 

 and students can, if they wish, read the works of any 

 authorities they desire to study. This is no doubt true, 

 and it makes it now possible for each university by 

 producing new knowledge to teach all the world, and 

 not only those who come to reside in its vicinity. Thus 

 the real students of each university are now spread all 

 over the world and not confined to its precincts, as they 

 were before the reproduction and distribution of thought 

 was as easy a matter as it is to-day. And this is a great 

 and important duty for universities, this producing and 

 teaching new knowledge to mankind, but it is not their 

 only duty. They should produce investigators and dis- 

 coverers as well as investigations and discoveries. Under 

 existing conditions, investigations and discoveries in the 

 borderlands of science cannot reasonably be expected to 

 lead to immediately useful results to mankind. They 

 may be most useful to our grandchildren, but one cannot 

 reasonably expect the ordinary motives of self-interest, 

 to which the greater part of the good work of the world 

 is due, to produce great work which may be of use to 

 other people's grandchildren. For the production of 

 such work, society, which has the greatest interest in 

 the matter, must depend upon other motives for the 

 production of great discoveries in pure science. The 

 motives and abilities that must here be depended on do 

 not exist in at all the same proportion of mankind as 

 self-interest and that general ability to carry out rules 

 which is sufficient for so much of the world's work. 

 Enthusiastic devotion to the investigation and discovery 

 of what is true, and the intellectual acuteness required 

 for its successful pursuit, are not of common occurrence, 

 and in a great many cases without special encourage- 

 ment and training will, e\en in those who are capable 

 of having these capacities highly developed, be over- 

 powered by the distractions of other motives claiming 

 attention to other fields of work. It is an important 

 duty for universities to seek out those in whom it is 

 possible to develop these motives and abilities ; 

 to encourage them to cultivate these abilities, and to 

 strengthen in every way the hold of these motives on 

 them. Almost the only way in which such motives can 

 be strengthened is by the sympathetic encouragement 

 of those who are already enthusiastic investigators and 

 NO. 1524, VOL. 59] 



discoverers. That this is a really successful way of 

 producing the character desired is fully proved by the 

 existence o{ disciples in every branch of human endeavour 

 that involves enthusiastic devotion of life. How is it 

 that so many of the passing generation of chemical 

 discoverers have been workers in the laboratories of 

 Liebig, for example ? The proportion of chemists who 

 studied with Liebig to the whole body of those who 

 have studied chemistry is very small indeed, but the 

 proportion of leaders of chemical discovery who have 

 studied under Liebig to the whole number of leaders of 

 chemical discovery is quite large. Why ? Because 

 Liebig's example was catching, his personality -was in- 

 spiring, his enthusiasm begot enthusiasm in his pupils ; 

 they became more than pupils, they became disciples. 



It is in pursuit of this end that the American uni- 

 versities desire to bring their staff and students into 

 personal relations with the leaders of thought. Though 

 there is every prospect that they soon will be, they are 

 not yet rich enough to control the market of English- 

 speaking thought production by making permanent 

 appointments, but they can and do provide for a 

 temporary residence of a leader of thought amongst 

 them. They do what they can to bring themselves into 

 personal relations with those who are likely to stir their 

 enthusiasm for research into useless truth, and thus 

 strengthen the motive which distinguishes investigators 

 and discoverers of the kind universities should produce. 



These lectures are eminently inspiring. They are full 

 of the seed from which discovery springs, of those sign- 

 posts on the borderlands of the known which point out 

 directions in which further knowledge is required. They 

 call attention to important investigations now in progress, 

 to the results so far achieved and to the results, too, that 

 are still only probable and require further investigation. 

 We do not generally get this in a book. We may 

 find it in published papers, but we should find it in 

 lectures delivered for the purpose of directing and 

 encouraging the researches of others. So much of this 

 is of only ephemeral value, though, like our dinners, of 

 enormous importance for each day's work, that it is not 

 usually published in book form nor often in scientific 

 papers, notwithstanding such an illustrious example as 

 Faraday. Working hypotheses, suggestions for work, 

 all these may turn out wrong, or useless for further 

 advance, but may be a very necessary part of the means 

 of advancing. We eat much that we cannot assimilate 

 in our dinners : it is a necessary concomitant of our 

 food, and a reasonable quantity of it is possibly necessary 

 for the satisfactory working of our organisms. Be that 

 as it may, the question of real importance in working 

 hypotheses is not so much, were they true, as, did they 

 lead to advance towards truth. Very few, indeed, who 

 have not suggested many wrong working hypotheses 

 have advanced truth at all, and still fewer have had 

 enthusiastic disciples. 



In these lectures we have studies of the possible 

 causes of atmospheric electricity depending on electro- 

 superficial double layers, a subject deserving most careful 

 investigation ; studies of a remarkable penetration of 

 kathode ray actions through such thick conductors that 

 Lenard rays seem out of the question, and that raises the 

 important question of the continuity or otherwise of the 



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