454 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLIX. No. 1272 



Society of Naturalists at Baltimore), this 

 present discussion is, I hope, an emphatic and 

 practical beginning of a definite movement 

 which will bring results. It is primarily, per- 

 haps, for the government men to point out the 

 needs. They are now assured of the warm 

 desire to cooperate on the part of the uni- 

 versity men, and it is only by the closest 

 cooperation that the best results can be 

 secTired. This involves more than mere sug- 

 gestions from the government to the univer- 

 sities. It should mean a thorough knowledge 

 on the part of the heads of the imiversity lab- 

 oratories of the intimate nature of the prob- 

 lems being studied and of the methods which 

 are being adopted to solve these problems. 

 Such a knowledge as this can best be gained 

 by personal contact with the workers, and 

 such contact should be of such a nature as to 

 bring about not only suggestions to the teach- 

 ers as to the best methods of training their 

 men for future government work but also sug- 

 gestions from the trained minds of the teach- 

 ers as to other directions or means of attack- 

 ing the problems which the government is 

 trying to solve. 



It would be an ideal arrangement if every 

 highly trained laboratory man in the prin- 

 cipal universities could be made a collaborator 

 of some government scientific bureau and 

 could be permitted and encouraged at govern- 

 ment expense to visit for a longer or shorter 

 time the different field laboratories of the 

 government working in lines in which he him- 

 self is working, and thus bring about the 

 personal knowledge and personal contact nec- 

 essary for both lines of suggestion. Such an 

 arrangement in a large way is probably im- 

 practical at present, but it might be started 

 in a small way and in individual cases and 

 will probably become eventually a fixed and 

 valuable policy. 



And now as to teaching and the training of 

 workers, I don't know whether as a rule teach- 

 ers have kept positive and relative values 

 clearly in their own minds and in the minds 

 of their students. Do they point out plainly 

 the practical utilizations of zoology? Do 

 they show their students the whole of the field 



that is open to the trained investigator, and 

 do they make their teaching as broadly at- 

 tractive as possible? Have they made enough 

 use of the great out-of-doors? Are they 

 utilizing to the full the educational help of 

 the motion picture? 



In general, a man coming from a university 

 to that branch of the government service with 

 which I am connected should be funda- 

 mentally sound in botany, chemistry and phys- 

 iology, and he should have an acquaintance 

 with the principal foreign languages in which 

 the results of important work are published. 



There is need, as my colleagues who are to 

 speak for other government bureaus will read- 

 ily admit, for several different types of men 

 in the service — men who have been trained for 

 different kinds of work — and this should be 

 borne in mind in considering the following 

 suggestions. 



"We need more training in taxonomy, that 

 basic branch of zoology upon which all other 

 work rests. 



We need an infinite amount of investigation 

 in the different tropisms, in behavior, in all 

 ecological lines, and, considering relative 

 values, forms should be chosen for such stud- 

 ies from among those species which have an 

 important economic rank or from among very 

 closely related forms. In many cases enor- 

 mous time has been comparatively wasted from 

 the want of recognition of the importance of 

 this point. 



There should be careful training in the 

 planning of experiments, in the interpretation 

 of results, in the collation of suggestive re- 

 sults, and in the preparation of reports. The 

 average man coming from a university is 

 wofully lacking in the latter training, and 

 gains it with slow progress after entering the 

 government service. 



As to cooperative work between the uni- 

 versities and the government laboratories, in 

 addition to the training of men by the former 

 for service in the latter, there is much that 

 can be done aside from this training and the 

 possible official collaboration of certain teach- 

 ers with traveling privileges hinted at in a 

 former paragraph. 



