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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LI. No. 1329 



the earth and the fulness thereof are not to 

 man; for if the Nature whose product he is 

 permits his enemies to thrive and multiply 

 notwithstanding his effort to protect himself, 

 she gives in this permission a strong sug- 

 gestion that his power is only an expression 

 of her own power, and that while he sleeps 

 and relaxes effort her activity continues un- 

 abated along the line of peopling the earth 

 toward its full capacity with a million forms 

 of creatures to each one of which she offers 

 the same fundamental problem as his own — 

 perpetuation of the individual and of its kind, 

 or restriction and disappearance, according to 

 its fitness and adaptability under the condi- 

 tions of the moment. 



We owe the privilege of wearing the key 

 of the Sigma Xi to the fact that at some time 

 or other each one of us has been recognized 

 by investigators as something of a zealot in 

 their own field, giving promise or bearing the 

 first fruits of his own investigation. In our 

 turn, we welcome to companionship the 

 brothers of a newer day. 



Most of us enter this fellowship from the 

 novitiate of university life imder guidance 

 and supervision. The foimders of the society, 

 themselves, had achieved in college or pro- 

 fessional school the qualifications that they 

 prescribe for membership. Their forerunners 

 in investigation through the centuries, for the 

 most part had traveled the same route. Our 

 organization is represented in laboratories 

 rather than in the halls of classic learning. 



Those of us who have been connected with 

 the society very long have no difficulty in 

 calling to mind a number of men of otur own 

 or an earlier or a later generation, whose lot 

 has not been cast in with the university or 

 the college, but who in purposeful prying into 

 science have shown the zeal that our society 

 stimulates and who in productive and stimu- 

 lating accomplishments may have surpassed 

 us of seemingly greater opportunity. Those 

 who initiated the inquiry into nature out 6f 

 which such enormous knowledge and utility 

 have poured into the lives of men within the 

 last few generations, trained themselves or 

 foimded the schools in which others have been 



trained. Their zeal and industry and wis- 

 dom were the attributes of the highest 

 human mentality: often, but unfortunately 

 not always, infectious; exceptionally, and this 

 happily, of such quality as to confer im- 

 munization on those who came into closest 

 contact with them. 



Like other forms of human social develop- 

 ment, the specialization of investigators offers 

 many parallels to the specialization of organs 

 and of organisms in natxire. Its beginnings 

 were very individualistic and sporadic. Its 

 spread was limited by the natural barriers of 

 sea and mountain, and the quite human 

 obstacles of differing race and language. In- 

 vestigation usually has meant not a road lead- 

 ing to a successfid career — as the animal suc- 

 cess of man is measured, but a bypath more 

 often leading to poverty and misvinderstand- 

 ing, and usually at best a way that could not 

 be traveled safely very far from the beaten 

 path of approved and utilized learning. My 

 own university mentor, Farlow, like his great 

 leader, Asa Gray, studied in the practical 

 field of medicine so that he might be assured 

 of the privilege of wandering — nobody could 

 tell how far — into investigation apart from its 

 immediate application in a necessary art. 



'No doubt it is true that to some investi- 

 gators the thought that no practical applica- 

 tion coidd be made of their discoveries has 

 lent added fascination to their work. No 

 doubt to others an investigation undertaken 

 with the purpose of securing the answer to 

 an economic question still lacks in attractive- 

 ness. The greatest incentive to such work 

 has been an innate thirst for knowledge for 

 its own sake and a love of its pursuit. 



Even with the multiplication and broaden- 

 ing and deepening of universities that the last 

 generation has witnessed, the privilege of add- 

 ing to knowledge, of shaping something up 

 by one's own effort, has resided very largely 

 in the opportunity offered by a imiversity 

 chair for stealing a little time and a little 

 effort from the first and paramoimt duty of 

 the professor, teaching what is known already 

 and training adaptable minds to meet life's 



