May 14, 1915] 



SCIENCE 



731 



of professional training — before the poet, tlie 

 novelist, the musician, or the artist could be- 

 come productive, what v^ould be left of the 

 literature and the art of the world? It is a 

 system of privilege when only those can enter 

 the professions whose parents are able to sup- 

 port them to the age of twenty-seven years; 

 it postpones too long family duties and civic 

 responsibility, and those who travel long over 

 well-worn ways may accumulate baggage and 

 habits which burden rather than help the ex- 

 ploration of new territory. 



Tour to-night's figurehead has been accused of 

 being habitually " agin the administrashun," 

 but in intention at least he is radical only as 

 to ends, while reasonably conservative as to 

 means. Our Society of Sigma Xi, like- the 

 university of which it is a part and much else 

 that is best in our civilization, is a heritage 

 handed down to us from other days and other 

 ways, only partly adjusted to a democracy in 

 the twentieth century. Institutions and cus- 

 toms should not be bent until they break; 

 they should be permitted to reach toward the 

 light by their own gradual growth. We can 

 not live in a true democracy until it exists, and 

 in the meanwhile we must do the best we can 

 with our inherited institutions and human 

 nature. Our society has in several directions 

 led the way — in placing research before high 

 grades in class work, in uniting those showing 

 the beginnings of aptitude for research work 

 with productive scientific men, in emphasizing 

 and promoting the comradeship and common 

 interests of scientific workers, in arranging 

 scientific meetings and lectures to which all 

 are welcome, in putting applied science on 

 terms of equality with other research, lastly 

 and chiefly in being one of the active agencies 

 contributing to scientific advance. 



It is anti-democratic to hold that culture is 

 precious because it can be attained only by 

 those having wealth and leisure, that science 

 is noble only when it is useless. The mathe- 

 matician who thanked God that his geometry 

 was a virgin that had never been prostituted 

 by being put to any use did not stay in Amer- 

 ica longer than he could help. Pure science 

 may proceed on a long orbit, but it can not 



go off on a tangent to the real things of life. 

 Our society has served both science and dem- 

 ocracy by placing engineering on terms of 

 equality with other sciences. The distinction 

 is not between scientific discovery and prac- 

 tical applications, but between the discovery 

 of new truths or new ways of doing things 

 and the repetition of those already learned; 

 not between the pathologist who studies dis- 

 eases and the one who finds cures, but between 

 the experimental pathologist and the routine 

 practising physician; not between the engi- 

 neer who builds bridges and the one who 

 writes about bridges, but between the scien- 

 tific man who devises new methods and the 

 builder who copies old models. Adopting 

 what Francis Bacon wrote in another connec- 

 tion: 



These two subjects, which on account of the nar- 

 rowness of men's views and the traditions of pro- 

 fessors have been so long dissevered, are, in fact, 

 one and the same thing, and compose one body of 

 science. 



And most of all, this Society of the Sigma 

 Xi has served democracy and science by em- 

 phasizing research work at the outset of the 

 student's career and as the essential life work 

 of each of our members. It is our business to 

 promote scientific research by every method 

 and by every motive. A correct statement of 

 the economic value of science to society would 

 at first sight seem incredible. It is safe to say 

 that the applications of science have quad- 

 rupled the productivity of labor and doubled 

 the length of human life, though it is not pos- 

 sible to give the exact period from which this 

 result is reckoned. The writer would guess 

 that so much progress has been made within 

 from one hundred to one hundred and fiLfty 

 years. In some kinds of work, as in the trans- 

 portation of freight over land and some kinds 

 of machinofacturing, the efficiency of labor 

 has been increased a hundredfold; in others, 

 as in agriculture, it may have been only 

 doubled. In the period during which the effi- 

 ciency of labor has been quadrupled by mod- 

 ern science, the annual production of wealth 

 in the civilized world has perhaps been in- 

 creased a hundred billion dollars, representing 



