June 18, 1920] 



SCIENCE 



603 



Even to-day and among our own friends 

 are to be found men who fail to see that the 

 university that we know not only watches 

 with some care over teaching schedules so 

 that the man who wishes to follow productive 

 lines in his scholarship may not find that he 

 has no time left for this after completing his 

 prescribed task as a teacher, and who fail to 

 comprehend that one is misplaced in a trua 

 Tiniversity if he can merely retail what others 

 have made known. 



As yet, most of us who have been judged 

 worthy of membership in the society of the 

 Sigma Si have acquired our status as in- 

 vestigators as a byproduct of our opportunity 

 as teachers; for what are called research pro- 

 fessors are few and far between, and organi- 

 zations for investigation only are none too 

 common. We find encouragement in the 

 stimulating fraternal association. We touch 

 at a tangent the productive activities, of 

 colleagues in our own department or in re- 

 lated departments. We lay our little offer- 

 ings before local or state or national gather- 

 ing of our confreres, and come home with 

 suggestions for bettering and amplifying our 

 own activities. We get what we may out of 

 an undigested and heterogeneous program, 

 and give little thought to the assimilability in 

 it of what we contribute to it. 



We are individualistic to a surprisingly 

 large degree. As a rule we are generous to 

 a fault with what we have to offer to others 

 and as a rule we are not greedy in seizing 

 on such help as they offer to give to us; 

 above all we are not markedly seekers after 

 advice or direction. We enjoy the preroga- 

 tives of the present, but cling to the methods 

 of the past. 



From the time when learning awoke after 

 the world's long sleep, when civilization began 

 really to have meaning outside of very re- 

 stricted circles, the occupation that has be- 

 come our profession has resembled my Antil- 

 lean century plants in following its inherent 

 bent. The conditions of its environment have 

 presented an increasingly harmonious opti- 

 Tnum for its simple existence, with neither 

 serious competition nor any great obstacle 



interposed anywhere to its drift along the 

 lines of least resistance — or in this case of 

 greatest attractiveness. That conditions have 

 changed is evident enough, but they have 

 changed gradually and the changes have been 

 in favoring directions. 



The aggregate utility of what is called 

 research had led, even, to its sedulous culti- 

 vation in a limited way : but even under culti- 

 vation it has shown few mutations imfitting 

 it for continued existence if once more 

 thrown over to the tmrestricted action of 

 natural selection. It has scarcely become 

 domesticated. Its survival and increase have 

 been of the fit rather than of the fittest, where 

 change about us has been gradual and of de- 

 gree rather than of kind, and where neglect 

 rather than encouragement have favored it. 

 It has resembled the wayside weed doing too 

 little harm to be worth repression, and more 

 or less useful for fodder or bedding-down 

 when the trouble was taken to harvest its 

 produce. 



Almost suddenly we are confronted with 

 totally different environing conditions. The 

 last decade has seen an interest in scientific 

 investigation that was unknown before. The 

 period of the war has brought its real value 

 to recognition. The harmless weed has been 

 seized on as most promising for intensive 

 cultivation. Its natural attributes are being 

 selected and blended with a skill such as the 

 agricultuiist uses in bettering his crops and 

 his stock. Its maximum development is 

 favored by a more or less serious effort to 

 remove or reduce disturbing competitors. 

 The stigma that science, the organizer of 

 knowledge, has not organized itself seems 

 about to be removed. 



" Tempera mutantur, et nos, in illis." The 

 almost catastrophic changes that the last few 

 years have brought into the human world is 

 placing scientific research on a business basis. 

 It is not too much to expect great things 

 from its effective organization as a means to 

 an end: or to expect it to yield quickly in 

 orderly controlled team play results that 

 individual fatuous effort could bring about 

 slowly and disconnectedly if at all. 



