526 
encourage and enhance the working powers 
of the successful candidates. 
Professor Mann, in his forthcoming re- 
port to the Carnegie Foundation, on Tech- 
nical Education, discusses the various 
methods by which improved scholarship 
may be secured and he alludes to the part 
played by the possibility of membership in 
Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi and Sigmi 
Xi, as valuable incentives to persistent ap- 
plication. But Professor Mann has sadly 
confused the ideals of the three societies 
when he puts them on the same basis. 
‘Scholarship, as Phi Beta Kappa and Tau 
Beta Pi know it, is vastly different from the 
scholarship that Sigma Xi exists to foster, 
and there are among you those whose men- 
tality and methods of work, whose scholastic 
record would undoubtedly shut out from 
either of the first two but entirely justify 
your membership in the last. To be able to 
pass examinations of a conventional type, 
to follow along well-marked paths, even 
with occasional obstructions is in marked 
contrast, educationally, from blazing a new 
way. You have been judged, either on the 
evidence of actual accomplishment or on 
the promise of marked ability, to be capable 
of leading, rather than of following, of ma- 
King discoveries for yourselves rather than 
of assimilating the results of others’ work. 
The field included in the ideals of the so- 
ciety is unlimited. Science, either pure or 
applied, certainly includes everything that 
affects life and living, provided the matter 
be approached in a scientific spirit, and 
while the society in the past has emphasized 
pure science and is likely to do so even more 
in the future, so that the membership has 
been found largely among those who are 
searching for evidences of the abstract laws 
of scientific truth, it has also welcomed 
those who have applied such laws to the 
benefit of industry and of human develop- 
ment. 
SCIENCE 
[N. 8. Von, XLVIII. No. 1236 
Professor Noyes, of the University of Illi- 
nois Chapter, has recently dwelt on the 
higher character of what he calls ‘‘discov- 
eries’’? aS compared with ‘‘inventions’’ 
though he grants that the society exists for 
the furtherance of both. He compares the 
value and genius of Faraday, a true discov- 
erer, with the work of Morse, who applied 
only the earlier researches in electrical and 
magnetic induction to the construction of 
the telegraph. He refers to the basie dis- 
covery of Newton and disparages the appli- 
cations of that discovery made by New- 
ton’s followers. In the same way, Pasteur’s 
epochmaking discoveries in bacteriology 
and epidemiology might be compared with 
the applications made by his followers, 
Lister, Behring, Roux, Flexner, Metchni- 
koff and a host of others. 
But the great majority of us can not hope 
to make discoveries and it may reasonably 
be asked whether the aim of the society will 
not be met quite as well by applying scien- 
tific law to practical problems as by per- 
sistently enquiring into some scientific field, 
a little corner of which seems to offer a 
chance for new discovery. Professor 
Titchener, some years ago, dwelt on the 
need for the true research worker to be un- 
selfish, to forget the thought of reward 
either through some practical application or 
through financial appreciation and he held 
out to members the idealized promise that 
only in the consciousness of faithful serv- 
ice'to an abstract desire for truth could re- 
ward be looked for. 
But to an engineer, accustomed by train- 
ing and habit to look on science and scien- 
tific laws as valuable only when capable of 
application and in these times when the 
whole world has been awakened to the fact 
that men skilled in research are indispen- 
sable to the prosecution of our world war, 
when the value of these very applications 
is everywhere recognized and when workers 
