92 



SCIENCE 



[Vol. LVI, No. 1439 



a caterpillar has foui' muscles or four thou- 

 sand, as described by the indefatigable Lyonnet ; 

 whether the light from metallic arcs may con- 

 tain wave lengths as short as a six hundred 

 thousandth of a millimeter; whether the solu- 

 tions of the violet salt of chromium sulphate 

 are stable at room temperature; whether there 

 are sixty or eighty thousand species of beetles. 

 And in other fields, what does it profit a man to 

 be able to point out the interpellations in the 

 Book of Ecclesiastes, or discover the origin of 

 the Edict of Milan or describe the marriage 

 customs of the small and obscure tribe of the 

 Todi. And yet there can be no doubt that 

 these and similar questions and their answers 

 constitute the great bulk of scientific knowl- 

 edge that has been accumulated during the past 

 three centuries. They are stowed away in 

 monographic contributions, proceedings and 

 transactions under innumerable rubrics which 

 no single man of science no matter how broad 

 his interests and comprehensive his knowledge 

 could possibly recall. This esoteric treasury of 

 knowledge, the very existence of which is un- 

 known, or indifferent, even to the so-called 

 educated classes, is like a vast safety deposit 

 vault with its many boxes large and small. 

 The keys are in many hands, but few there be 

 that can open more than two or three of the 

 boxes. 



Nevertheless the scientific investigator and 

 the scholar has his own peculiar rewards. He 

 finds a few like-minded persons to cooperate 

 with him. Scientific research is not simply a 

 solitary indulgence of infrequent and eccentric 

 individuals. Little drops of knowledge coalesce 

 into bigger drops, and odds and ends of de- 

 tailed information gradually get shifted into 

 patterns of great interest and beauty. Tor the 

 world proves to be indefinitely investigable. 

 Then there is much refreshingly hmnan in the 

 pursuit of knowledge. The investigator is the 

 hero in a romance; he is keener than the sleuth 

 of the detective tale and knows it. He has his 

 territorial disputes, his ententes and his wars 

 with his fellow scientists. 



It is apparent however that the sustained 

 and arduous scientific research which has grad- 

 ually built up our fund of knowledge is a 

 pursuit for the few. It is far from a seductive 



occupation for even creative minds of the 

 poetic and religious type. It often requires 

 years to ascertain facts and record observations 

 that will in the end fill a small, abstruse and 

 technical pamphlet. For research is mainly 

 looking for things that are not there and 

 attempting processes that will not occur. The 

 layman has little notion of this. Experimental 

 science is tireless fumbling and groping or, in 

 its taxonomic aspects, the painful discrimina- 

 tion and comparison of detail. It is subject to 

 innumerable disappointments in following 

 trails that lead out into a boundless desert or 

 up against barriers that it seems hopeless to 

 try to scale. For the scientist does not make 

 his own landscape as does the poet and even 

 many philosophers, nor can he fly hither and 

 thither at will, bvxt he subjects himself to the 

 tyranny of the natural phenomena or processes 

 that he is observing, and, as Bacon says, he 

 works "according to his stuff and is limited 

 thereby." 



The successs of modern scientific emulation 

 lies very largely in its stubborn refusal to con- 

 sider natural phenomena in terms of human 

 impulse and mankind's native interests. Dur- 

 ing the Middle Ages the world was thought to 

 be made for man. It was the vestibule to an 

 eternal existence that awaited every human 

 soul beyond the grave. As his transient so- 

 journing place and scene of trial it had a 

 moral and edifying quality which underlay a 

 great part of the speculation about natural 

 things. Around about the earth were the 

 heavens, the ever perfect and incorruptible 

 dwelling place of God and the angels and of 

 the blessed who were found worthy to see 

 His face. Those who began the reconstruc- 

 tion and further amplifying of knowledge, 

 from the early seventeenth century onward, 

 were on their guard against these older genial 

 anthropomorphic and geocentric conceptions of 

 Nature, and they also found various excuses 

 for neglecting the sanctified interpretations 

 prevailing in the universities. The preferences 

 of the observer were to be ruled out. He was 

 to be merely a careful and neutral spectator 

 who must not allow himself to become so 

 warmly implicated in his discoveries as to sac- 

 rifice a whit of his eager indifference. Of 



