532 
the truth be known unless we, who have 
educational laboratories at our hands, make 
use of them. 
May I then express the hope that among 
you, the newly elected members, there may 
be some who will find the subjects for their 
future experimental work, not in abstract 
research, without thought of reward, car- 
ried on in the sole interest of science, but 
rather in modern practical applications, in 
attempted solutions of the many insistent 
problems of labor, industry and of educa- 
tion, that the existence of the university 
may be more fully justified and the pur- 
pose of the Society of Sigma Xi the better 
realized. 
H. N. Ogpen 
CoRNELL UNIVERSITY 
INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH AND NA- 
TIONAL WELFARE}? 
I HAVE no justification for expressing views 
about scientific and industrial research except 
the sympathetic interest of an observer for 
many years at rather close range. One look- 
ing on comes to realize two things. One is 
the conquest of practical life by science; there 
seems to be no department of human activity 
in which the rule of thumb man has not come 
to realize that science which he formerly de- 
spised is useful beyond the scope of his own 
individual experience. The other is that sci- 
ence like charity should begin at home, and 
has done so very imperfectly. Science has 
been arranging, classifying, methodizing, sim- 
plifying everything except itself. It has made 
. possible the tremendous modern development 
of the power of organization which has so 
multiplied the effective power of human effort 
so as to make the differences from the past 
seem to be of kind rather than of degree. It 
has organized itself very imperfectly. Scien- 
tific men are only recently realizing that the 
1A statement made by the Honorable Hlihu 
Root at the initial meeting of the Advisory Com- 
mittee on Industrial Research of the National Re- 
search Council, held in New York on May 29, 1918. 
SCIENCE 
[N. S. Vou. XLVIII. No. 1248 
principles which apply to success on a large 
scale in transportation and manufacture 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 organization just as the effective 
power of a great number of laborers may be 
increased by military discipline. 
This attitude follows naturally from the de- 
mand of true scienific work for individual 
concentration and isolation. The sequence, 
however, is not- necessary or laudable. Your 
isolated and concentrated 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 some- 
thing about what his contemporaries are try- 
ing to do, or he will waste his life in dupli- 
cating effort. The history of science is so vast 
and contemporary effort is so active that if 
he undertakes to acquire this knowledge by 
himself alone his life is largely wasted in do- 
ing that his initiative and creative power are 
gone before he is ready to use them. Oc- 
casionally 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 capable of real scientific gvork. 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 
a wearisome thing to think of the millions of 
facts that are being laboriously collected to 
no purpose whatever, and the thousands of 
tons of printed matter stored in basements 
never to be read—all the product of unorgan- 
ized and undirected scientific spirit. Augustus 
De Morgan denying the divinity of Francis 
Bacon says “ What are large collections of 
facts for? To make theories from, says 
Bacon to try ready made theories by, says the 
