April 11, 1919] 



SCIENCE 



349 



For a long time he seemed to be content to 

 remain in comparative obscurity, while direct- 

 ing others into paths of conspicuous achieve- 

 ment. He was made assistant professor of 

 physics in 1895, after six years of teaching, in 

 which he had published little or nothing de- 

 scriptive of research. This was partly because 

 he had a most severe standard for what a 

 research paper should be: it should describe 

 some piece of work so well done that no one 

 would ever have to investigate this particular 

 matter again. To this standard he held true, 

 with the result that his published papers were 

 remarkably few and remarkably significant. 



One might have expected him, when he 

 found time for research, to take up some prob- 

 lem in light, for that seemed to be his chief 

 field of interest; but accident, and a sense of 

 duty, turned him to a different quarter. The 

 Fogg Art Museum, on its completion in 1897, 

 proved to have an auditorium that was monu- 

 mental in its acoustic badness, and President 

 Eliot, who had formed a high opinion of 

 Sabine's qualities, called upon him to find a 

 remedy, as a practical service to the university. 

 With this warrant for diverting some of his 

 energy from teaching, Sabine entered upon an 

 investigation which proved to be his most 

 conspicuous scientific work. Though he was 

 dealing with a new structure, he was attacking 

 a practical problem as old as the institution of 

 public buildings. It had never been solved 

 before in any thorough-going manner. He did 

 solve it, and he did this not by virtue of any 

 extraordinary resources given by modem sci- 

 ence. He did it in such a way as to show that 

 it might have been done by a man like him 

 centuries before. Not only did he cure the 

 defect of tlie particular room that first en- 

 gaged his attention ; he went on with his study 

 till he could tell in advance what the acoustic 

 qualities of a projected auditorimn would be; 

 and his visible instruments in all this achieve- 

 ment were organ pipes, common fabrics and 

 materials, and the unaided human ear. 



Was it, then so easy and simple a thing to 

 do? Did he merely hapjwn to fiiid the solu- 

 tion of a difficulty thousands of years old? 

 No. He succeeded by reason of a combination 



of qualities, among which were unending 

 patience and untiring energy. He must work 

 in the small hours of the night, when other 

 men had ceased from their noisy labors and 

 when street-cars were infrequent; he must, for 

 certain ends, work only in the sununer, when 

 windows could be kept open ; in the early 

 summer, before the crickets began their 

 nightly din. He must work with the most 

 scrupulous regard for conditions that to an- 

 other might seem trivial. He once threw 

 away the observations of months because he 

 had failed to record the clothes he wore while 

 at his work. Such was the difficulty of his 

 undertaking, on the mere physical side, and 

 such the rigor of his devotion to it. We say 

 of such a man, It is a pity he died so young. 

 If he had taken care of himself, had been 

 regular in his meals and in his hours of sleep, 

 he would have had a long as well as a useful 

 life. Yes; but the things he undertook to do, 

 and did do, can not be done by a man who 

 must be regular at his meals and regular in 

 his hours of sleep. 



The establishment of a Graduate School of 

 Applied Science, in place of the undergraduate 

 Lawrence Scientific School which had existed 

 at Harvard for a long time, was the result of 

 a movement led by Sabine in 1906. It was 

 doubtless his hope, from the start of his con- 

 nection with this revolutionary action, to 

 make the Harvard School of Applied Science 

 one of the highest and best in the world; but 

 concerning the wisdom of making it distinc- 

 tively and only a graduate school, he was not 

 altogether positive, in spite of the fact that tlie 

 suggestion to make it such is attributed to 

 him. In fact, the decision of the faculty to 

 approve this policy was arrived at in a cu- 

 riously casual way. Argument against it was 

 made at a faculty meeting, and nobody seemed 

 to be confidently in favor of it. Sabine told a 

 colleague the next day that just before the vote 

 was taken he tried to get the president's at- 

 tention, to move a postponement of the ques- 

 tion. He did not succeed, the vote was taken, 

 and the policy was launched. 



Sabine took the dcanship of the Scientific 

 School reluctantly, at the urgent request of 



