150 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LI. No. 1311 



in greatly increased numbers. The enlarged 

 appreciation of science by the public, the 

 demand for investigators in the industries, 

 and the attitude of industrial leaders of wide 

 vision toward fundamental science, should 

 facilitate attempts to secure the added endow- 

 ments and equipment required. 



On the whole, the outlook in America seems 

 most encouraging. But the great advance in 

 science that thus appears to be within reach 

 can not be attained without organized effort 

 and much hard work. On the one hand, the 

 present interest of the public in science must 

 be developed and utilized to the full and on 

 the other, the spirit of cooperation that played 

 so large a part during the war must be applied 

 to the lasting advantage of science and re- 

 search. Fortunately enough, this spirit has 

 not been confined within national boundaries. 

 The harmony of purpose and unity of effort 

 displayed by the nations of the Entente in 

 the prosecution of the war have also drawn 

 them more closely together in science and 

 research, with consequences that are bound to 

 prove fruitful in coming years. 



The Honorable Elihu Root, who combines 

 the wide vision of a great statesman with a 

 keen appreciation of the importance and 

 methods of scientific research, has recently 

 expressed himself as follows: 



Science has been arranging, classifying, method- 

 izing, simplifying everything except itself. It has 

 made possible the tremendous modern development 

 ■of the power of organization which has so multi- 

 plied the effective power of human effort as to 

 make the differences from the past seem to be of 

 kind rather than of degree. It has organized itself 

 very imperfectly. Scientliie men are only recently 

 realizing that the principles which apply to suc- 

 cess on a large scale in transportation and manu- 

 facture and general staff work apply to them, that 

 the difference between a mob and an army does 

 not depend upon occupation or purpose but upon 

 human nature; that the effective power of a great 

 number of scientific men may be increased by or- 

 ganization just as the effective power of a great 

 number of laborers may be increased by military 

 discipline. 



The emphasis laid by Mr. Eoot on the im- 

 portance of organization in science must not 



be misinterpreted. For many years he has 

 been president of the board of trustees of 

 tlie Carnegie Institution of Washington, and 

 an active member of its executive committee. 

 Thus kept in close touch with scientific re- 

 search, he is well aware of the vital impor- 

 tance of individual initiative and the necessity 

 of encouraging the independent efforts of the 

 original thinker. Thus he goes on to say: 



This attitude follows naturally from the demand 

 of true scientific work for individual concentra- 

 tion and isolation. The sequence, however, is not 

 necessary or laudable. Your isolated and concen- 

 trated scientist must know what has gone before, 

 or he will waste his life in doing what has already 

 been done, or in repeating past failures. He must 

 know something about what his contemporaries are 

 trying to do, or he will waste his life in duplieat- 

 iug effort. The history of science is so vast and 

 contemporary effort is so active that if he under- 

 takes to acquire this knowledge by himself alone 

 his life is largely wasted in doing that; his initia- 

 tive and creative power are gone before he is ready 

 to use them. Occasionally a man appears who has 

 the instinct to reject the negligible. A very great 

 mind goes directly to the decisive fact, the deter- 

 mining symptom, and can afford not to burden 

 itself with a great mass of unimportant facts; but 

 there are few such minds even among those ca- 

 pable of real scientific work. All other minds need 

 to be guided away from the useless and towards the 

 useful. That can be done only by the application 

 of scientific method to science itself through the 

 purely scientific process of organizing effort. 



It is plain that if we are to have effective 

 organization in science, it must be adapted 

 to the needs of the individual worker, stimu- 

 lating him to larger conceptions, emphasizing 

 the value of original effort, and encouraging 

 independence of action, while at the same 

 time securing the advantages of wide cooper- 

 ation and division of labor, reducing unnec- 

 essary duplication^ of work and providing the 

 means of facilitating research and promoting 

 discovery and progress. 



A casual view of the problem of effecting 

 such organization of science might lead to 

 the conclusion that the aims just enumerated 

 are mutually incompatible. It can be shown 



2 Some duplication is frequently desirable. 



