July 19, 1912] 



SCIENCE 



69 



Touching the agricultural experiment 

 stations, the history is complicated and per- 

 plexing, but we are justified, I believe, in 

 carrjang back the guiding idea in their 

 development to that expressed by Washing- 

 ton in his annual message to Congress in 

 1796, where he says, when pleading for the 

 establishment of a national board of agri- 

 culture, that one of the functions of such a 

 board should be "to encourage and assist a 

 spirit of discovery and improvement . . . 

 by stimulating to enterprise and experi- 

 ment." This is certainly sound doctrine. 



The Carnegie Institution in the original 

 formulation of its general plans was much 

 influenced by the experience and early pro- 

 gram of the Smithsonian Institution, but 

 the original statement of aims strikes a new 

 note when it declares one of these aims 

 to be 



To discover the exceptional man in every depart- 

 ment of study whenever and wherever found, inside 

 or outside of schools, and enable him by financial 

 aid to make the work for which he seems specially 

 designed, his life work. 



It is said that this paragraph touching 

 the exceptional man has caused much 

 trouble to the Carnegie Institution and 

 often spread its path with thorns. It ap- 

 pears that in some instances it has been 

 misunderstood. Self-discovered exceptional 

 men have proved to be embarrassingly nu- 

 merous. That does not strike one as so 

 very strange, however, since the community 

 grows wise but slowly. 



The word ' ' exceptional ' ' you see has suf- 

 fered misinterpretation. The really excep- 

 tional man is not so often the aberrant 

 prodigy as the individual who presents in 

 his composition a large collection of first- 

 rate qualities, no one of which is neces- 

 sarily alarming, but all of which together 

 make for scientific effectiveness of the high- 

 est order. In the course of its develop- 

 ment, the Carnegie Institution has, I think, 



lived up to this ideal with notable success 

 — putting the saner interpretation on the 

 word ' ' exceptional. ' ' My commendation of 

 the paragraph is similarly based. 



But none of these instances which I have 

 mentioned — together with a large group of 

 others — come very close to medicine. This 

 contact was first clearly established in 1888 

 by the Pasteur Institute in Paris, an insti- 

 tute intended to facilitate the work of the 

 great scientist whose name it bore, and to 

 continue the remembrance of him. It was 

 an instance of the generous giving of aid 

 and assistance to a master-man — ^with no 

 prescriptions and no hampering limitations. 

 Pasteur was a genius who combined the art 

 of mediation between the laboratory facts 

 and practical problems, with the capacity 

 for speculative thought and scientific 

 achievement in the highest sense, and who, 

 nevertheless, did not allow his human inter- 

 est to impair his scientific thoroughness. 



In this country among the foundations 

 closely related to medicine we have recently 

 seen established the Rockefeller Institute, 

 the Memorial Institute for Infectious Dis- 

 eases, the Ortho S. A. Sprague Memorial 

 Institute, both of these at Chicago, together 

 with a number of others representing much 

 the same purpose, but with less ample re- 

 sources, as well as several funds devoted to 

 the study of cancer, tuberculosis or other 

 special diseases. These instances, because 

 they touch medicine, might well be exam- 

 ined in detail, but we shall discuss them 

 only in their most general relations. 



It seems a fair question to ask why these 

 institutes and funds have been established. 

 The immediate causes are plain enough, 

 and are frankly philanthropic in most 

 cases. Personal experience with a disease 

 has led more than one man to devote a 

 large sum to the search for its control or 

 cure or going a step further, and recog- 

 nizing that the application of laboratory 



