Sept. 24, 1885] 
NATURE 
EL 
gravity determinations now in progress—and to express the hope 
that such valuable work may not be interrupted. 
Resolved, That this Association expresses, also, the hope that 
the Government will not allow any technical rule to be esta- 
blished. that shall necessarily confine its scientific work to its 
own employés. 
Resolved, That in the opinion of the American Association for 
the Advancement of Science, the head of the Coast Survey 
should be appointed by the President, by and with the advice 
and consent of the Senate, should have the highest possible 
standing among scientific men, and should command their 
entire confidence. 
Resolved, That copies of these resolutions shall be prepared 
by the general secretary, and certified by the President of the 
Association and by the permanent secretary, and shall be for- 
warded to the President of the United States, the Secretary of 
the Treasury, and given to the press. 
Various improvements with the object of securing a 
more rapid despatch of business were either suggested 
or adopted ; thus members are to be elected by a standing 
committee instead of in general session, and it is proposed 
to restrict general sessions of the Association to the 
beginning and close of the meeting, and to limit the 
public reading of committee reports in general session to 
such as seem to the standing committee specially desir- 
able from their interest or importance. The next meeting 
will be held at Buffalo, beginning August 18, 1886, under 
the presidency of Prof. Edward S. Morse, of Salem. 
We regret much that it is impossible for us to repro- 
duce in full the President’s address and the sectional 
reports ; the obvious pressure on our space at the present 
time will only enable us to refer to a few salient topics. 
The President’s address was delivered by Prof. J. P. 
Lesley, of Philadelphia. We find the following striking 
observations on the “‘dead-work ” of science :— 
There is a topic which I think should be frequently considered 
by all who engage in scientific pursuits, and by none so earnestly 
as by those who are ambitious to reach the higher points of view, 
from which to survey and describe those systematic combina- 
tions of phenomena which are more or less panoramic: I allude 
of course to generalisers or discoverers of natural laws, and the 
professional teachers of such laws: while those who deal in 
itemised science, the mere observers of isolated facts, discrimin- 
ating specimens and naming genera and species in the animal, 
vegetable, or mineral worlds, and especially such as occupy 
themselves with geographical and geological studies in detail, 
stand in less need of having it pressed upon their attention, 
because in their case it insists upon its own necessity. 
I allude to what is technically known among experts as 
“dead-work.” 
This topic has to be treated in the most prosaic style. To 
descrike dead-work is to narrate all those portions of our work 
which consume the most time, give the most trouble, require the 
greatest patience and endurance, and seem to produce the most 
Insignificant results. It comprises the collection, collation, com- 
parison and adjustment, the elimination, correction, and re- 
selection, the calculation and representation—in a word, the 
entire first, second, and third handling of our data in any branch 
of human learning—wholly perfunctory, preparatory, and me- 
chanical, wholly tentative, experimental, and defensive—without 
which it is dangerous to proceed a single stage into reasoning 
on the unknown, and futile to imagine that we can advance in 
science ourselves, or assist in its advancement in the world. It 
is that tedious, costly, and fatiguing process of laying a good 
foundation which no eye is ever to see, for a house to be built 
thereon for safety and enjoyment, for public uses or for monu- 
mental beauty. Itis the labour of a week to be paid for on 
Saturday night. It is the slow recruiting, arming, drilling, 
victualling, and transporting of an entire army to secure victory 
in one short battle. It is the burden of dead weight which 
every great discoverer has had to carry for years and years, un- 
known to the world at large, before the world was electrified by 
his appearance as its genius. Let us examine it more closely : 
it will repay our scrutiny. Those of you who have been more 
or less successfully at work all your lives may get some satisfac- 
tion from the retrospect: and those who have commenced 
careers should hear what dead-work means, what its uses are, 
how indispensable it is, how honourable it is, and what stores of 
health and strength and happiness it reserves for them. 
My propositions, then, are these :—(1) That, without a large 
amount of this dead-work, there can be no discovery of what is 
rightly called a scientific truth. (2) That, without a large 
amount of dead-work on the part of a teacher of science, he 
will fail in his efforts to impart true science to his scholars. (3) 
That, without a large amount of dead-work, no professional 
expert can properly serve, much less inform and command, his 
clients or employers. (4) That nothing but a habitual per- 
formance of dead work can keep the scientific judgment in a 
safe and sound condition to meet emergencies, or prevent it from 
falling more or less rapidly into decrepitude ; and (5) That in 
the case of highly-organised thinkers, disposed or obliged to 
exercise habitually the creative powers of the imagination, or to 
exhaust the will-power in frequently-recurring decisions of diffi- 
cult and doubtful questions, dead-work and plenty of it is their 
only salvation ; nay, the most delicious and refreshing recrea- 
tion; a panacea for disgust, discouragement, and care; an 
elixir vitze ; a fountain of perpetual youth. . . . 
First, then, is it so that scientific truths cannot be discovered 
without a large amount of preliminary dead-work? Surely no 
one in this assembly doubts it who has established even one 
original theory for himself, or won for it the suffrages of judges 
capable of weighing evidence. Now the immense disproportion 
in numbers between theories broached and theories accepted is 
the best proof we could have, not only of the value and necessity 
of dead-work, but of the scarcity of those who depend upon it 
as a preparatory stage of theorising. And, moreover, not 
theories only, but simple statements of fact believed and dis- 
believed—that is, finally accepted or finally rejected—exhibit 
the like numerical disproportion, and betray a general careless- 
ness or laziness of observers ; at all events their manifest lack of 
appreciation of the value and necessity of the dead-work part of 
observation, which imperatively must precede any clear mental 
perception of the simplest phenomenon, before the attempt is 
made to establish its natural relationships, and present it for 
acceptance as a part of science. 
No ; dead work cannot be delegated. The man who cannot 
himself survey and map his field, measure and draw his sections 
properly, and perfectly represent with his own pencil the 
characteristic variations of its fossil forms, has no just right to call 
himself an expert geologist. These are the badges of initia- 
tion ; and the only guarantees which one can offer to the world 
of science that one is a competent observer and a trustworthy 
generaliser, Nor has one become a true man of science until 
he has already done a vast amount of this dead work ; nor does 
one continue in his prime, as a man of science, after he has 
ceased to bring to this test of his own ability to see, to judge, 
and to theorise, the working and thinking of other men. But 
enough of this. 
My second proposition was that no teacher of science can be 
successful who does not himself encounter some of the dead work 
of the explorer and discoverer ; who does not discipline his own 
faculties of perception, reflection, and generalisation, by field- 
work and office-work, independently of all text-book assistance ; 
who does not himself make at least some of the diagrams, tables, 
and pictures for his class-room, in as original a spirit and with 
as much precision of detail as if none such had ever been made 
before, and these were to remain sole monuments of the genius 
of investigation. What the true teacher has to do first and fore- 
most is to wake up in youthful minds this spirit of investigation 
ab initio. The crusade against scholastic cramming promises to 
be successful ; but the crusade against pedagogic cramming has 
hardly yet been organised. How is the scholar to be made an 
artist if the teacher cannot draw? The instinct of imitation in 
man is irresistible. Slovenly drawing on the blackboard— 
sufficient evidence of the teacher’s imperfect information and 
inaccurate conception of facts, the nature of which he only 
thinks he understands—can do little more than raise a cold fog 
of suspicion in the class-room, by which the tender sprouts of 
learning must be either dwarfed or killed. But even slovenly 
diagrams are preferable to purchased ones ; for whatever dimin- 
ishes the dead-work of a teacher enervates his investigating, 
and thereby his demonstrating, powers, and lowers him toward 
the level of his scholars. 
Were I dictator I should drive all teachers of science out into 
the great field of dead-work ; force them to go through all the 
gymnastics of original research and its description, and not per- 
mit them to return to their libraries until their notebooks 
