January 21, 1921] 



SCIENCE 



59 



As both types of investigation are equally 

 essential to the fullest spiritual and eco- 

 nomic exploitation of the universe, no so- 

 ciety can attain to a high level of culture 

 unless it provides impartially both for its 

 discoverers and its inventors. 

 < There is another classification of investi- 

 gators ■v\^hich will be useful for the purposes 

 of my argument — namely, into profession- 

 als and amateurs. I am, of course-, using 

 these words in their good sense, not with 

 tihe evil connotations that have grown up 

 around them. It is clear that both may 

 suifer from certain disabilities, the profes- 

 sional from well-known guild restrictions, 

 the amateur from lack of opportunity or 

 equipment or of the lively interchange of 

 ideas so necessary to the most fruitful type 

 of investigation. Both, too, have their ad- 

 vantages, the professional in the support 

 and advertisement of his guild^fellows, the 

 amateur in the freedom to choose and de- 

 limit his own problems, to work on them in 

 his own way and to publish when he sees 

 fit. These distinctions did not escape that 

 clever old fox, Samuel Butler, who says:" 



There is no excuse for amateur work being bad. 

 Amateurs often excuse their shortcomings on the 

 ground that they are not professionals, the pro- 

 fessional could plead with greater justice that he is 

 not an amateur. The professional has not, he 

 might well say, the leisure and freedom from 

 money anxieties which will let him devote himself 

 to his art in singleness of heart, telling of things 

 as he sees them without fear of what man shall say 

 unto him; he must think not of what appears to 

 him right and lovable but of what his patrons vrill 

 think and of what the critics will tell his patrons 

 to say they thiuk; he has got to square every one 

 all round and will assuredly fail to make his way 

 unless he does this; if, then, he betrays his trust 

 he does so under temptation. Whereas the ama- 

 teur who works with no higher aim than that of 

 immediate recognition betrays it from the vanity 



, 8 -"The Notebooks of Samuel Butler." Edited 

 by H. F. Jones. N. T., E. P. Button & Co., 1917, 

 p. 145. 



and wantonness of his spirit. The one is naughty 

 because he ds needy, the other from natural de- 

 pravity. Besides the amateur can keep his work 

 to himself, whereas the professional man must ex- 

 hibit or starve. 



Contrasting the professional and ama- 

 teur, to the advantage of the latter, was also 

 a favorite pastime with that irritable old 

 bear, Schopenhauer.^" He compared the 

 professionals with dogs, the amateurs with 

 wolves, but he was not always consistent 

 zoologically, for he sometimes thought of 

 the professionals as cattle, as e.g., when he 

 says: 



On the whole, the stall-feeding of our pro- 

 fessorships is most suitable for ruminants, but 

 those who receive their prey from the hands of 

 Nature, live best in the open. 



At present the terms professional and 

 amateur seem to have fallen into disuse 

 among scientists, for reasons that are not 

 far to seek. We know that during the 

 eighteenth and nineteenth ©enturies, when 

 the books and apparatus necessary for the 

 prosecution of research were so meager as 

 to be within the reach of men of very mod- 

 erate means, amateurs were able to do a 

 vast amount of important work in all the 

 departmenlts of science. This was particu- 

 larly true in England and America. In 

 England we have a teacher of music, "Wm. 

 Herschel, making great discoveries in as- 

 tronomy; a stone-cutter, Hugh MUler, in 

 geology; a Nottingham cobbler, George 

 Green, in mathematics; a grocer of Igh- 

 tham, Harrison, and a jeweller of St. Leon- 

 ards, W. J. L. Abbott, in archeology, and 

 a country gentleman, Charles Darwin, in 

 biology. There were men like John Hunter, 

 Lyall, "Wallace, Galton, Samuel Butler, 

 Lubbock, Bates and a host of other emi- 

 nent investigators, who really belonged to 

 the class of amateurs. Till very recently 

 whole sciences, such as taxonomy and 

 10 ioco citato, Vol. 6, p. 519. 



