10 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLV. No. 1149 



poor library unless the immense majority 

 of the books are by men who are not of 

 epoch-making genius; and in any com- 

 munity in which much first-class scientific 

 work is being done the bulk of it will be to 

 the credit of men who do not pretend to 

 belong to the highest category. In the 

 scientific, as in every other field of en- 

 deavor here in the United States, there is 

 ample room for the man who can not be 

 called a genius but who can do capital 

 work. Nevertheless, it remains true that 

 the third-rate man can not produce first- 

 rate work and that from the standpoint of 

 the world, while it is well to help or train 

 the third-rate man to do his third-rate 

 work well, what is of most importance is to 

 give the first-rate man the training and 

 the apparatus to do the first-rate work, 

 which, unless he does it, will not be done 

 at all. 



Let me give my statement more precision 

 by speaking of just one small corner of the 

 scientific field, that with which I am most 

 familiar — the study of ornithology and 

 mammalogy. In these fields there is need 

 for work by experts who are only closet 

 workers. But there is far more need of 

 work by field naturalists. Most of all there 

 is need of work by trained laboratory men 

 who also possess a wide field experience. 

 As regards mammals, there is still a good 

 deal of work to be done in mere collecting, 

 but even as regards mammals, and in- 

 finitely more as regards birds, the days of 

 the supremacy of the mere collector have 

 passed. This is true even of the least known 

 parts of the earth, and is infinitely more 

 true here of New York. The man who 

 merely collects multitudes of bird skins or 

 mammal skins, and then goes over them 

 with laborious minuteness in the study, for 

 the purpose of a classification which really 

 represents primarily a fetishistic adora- 

 tion of a highly conventional and technical 



trinomial terminology, must always occupy 

 a humble, and may readily occupy a merely 

 useless, position in the scientific world. 

 The ordinary pamphlet describing new 

 subspecies and even new species, differen- 

 tiated from one another by trifling char- 

 acteristics, represents work which it is true 

 possesses a slight usefulness ; but it is a use- 

 fulness not entitling the author to a grade 

 much above that of the man who totes 

 bricks in a wheelbarrow. Ninety-nine 

 times out of a hundred these little pamph- 

 lets are of interest exclusively to rival, and 

 equally unimportant, pamphleteers with 

 slightly different views on terminology, and 

 on trivial questions of subspecific differ- 

 ences. Generalizations based on sheer 

 imagination or on imperfectly observed 

 facts or on entirely insufficient data are at 

 best useless, and are apt to be mischievous. 

 Any type of honest work by the intellectual 

 brick-collectors and wheelbarrow men is 

 better than such dishonest attempts to pass 

 off castles in the air as productive real 

 estate. But mere vast collections of minute 

 facts, which in themselves are of trivial 

 importance, without any attempt to ex- 

 plain and correlate these facts, and with- 

 out cautious wisdom to generalize from 

 them, are of strictly limited usefulness. 



Study of the interrelations of the lines 

 of descent among birds and beasts is of ab- 

 sorbing interest. Study of the compara- 

 tive effect of environment and heredity on 

 physical structure is no less interesting. 

 There must be ample research in the labo- 

 ratory in order even to present these prob- 

 lems, not to speak of solving them, and 

 there can be no laboratory study without 

 the accumulation of masses of dry facts 

 and specimens. I do not for a moment 

 mean that there should be any failure to 

 recognize the need of such accumulation of 

 facts. But I do mean that there should be 

 an equally clear recognition, that the ac- 



