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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIX. No. 1014 



vestigators is composed mainly of generals. 

 Only a few are willing to serve in any other 

 capacity after announcing by means of a 

 doctor's degree or by some scientific publi- 

 cation that they have learned to walk alone. 

 It is true that many of them were supported 

 by the kindly hand of their teacher during 

 this first walking- exhibition and some of 

 these never learn to walk alone ; but, never- 

 theless, they too often want to be generals 

 or nothing in the army of the investigators. 

 The difficulty of learning to walk alone as 

 an investigator seems to vary very much 

 with the different sciences. In mathematics, 

 for instance, the man who has just reached 

 his doctor's degree in an American or in a 

 German university can not be expected to 

 have completely acquired this art,- while 

 some of the newer sciences seem to present 

 the strange phenomenon of babies born 

 with walking capabilities. These wide dif- 

 ferences may be expected to diminish with 

 the more extensive scientific developments 

 and with the growth of fraternal relations 

 between investigators. 



The question arises whether the inde- 

 pendence of the separate investigators is 

 an ideal condition and whether this condi- 

 tion should be maintained in view of the 

 rapid increase of the number of investiga- 

 tors. Our scientific army seems to have 

 adopted Indian war tactics to the extent 

 that each man is selecting his own tree and 

 is firing at the cohorts of ignorance from 

 his sheltered position. In a new and unde- 

 veloped country this may be proper and 

 may lead to the best results^ but it is at 

 least conceivable that as time goes on the 

 army of scientists has to be reorganized 

 along different lines in order to secure the 

 most effective work. The Committee of One 

 Hundred on Scientific Eesearch recently 

 appointed by the American Association for 

 the Advancement of Science may be a step 

 towards such a general reorganization. 

 2 Cf. M. Boelier, Science, Vol. 38 (1913), p. 546. 



In some of the sciences special reorgani- 

 zation has already been started. By way 

 of illustration we need only to refer to the 

 recent work of the Astronomische Gesell- 

 sehaft, which, by international cooperation, 

 secured accurate observations of the posi- 

 tions of one hundred and sixty-six thou- 

 sand stars. Such organizations tend to 

 limit, along certain lines, the independence 

 of the investigator, and hence they affect 

 our ideals, at least as regards some investi- 

 gators. It remains, however, still true that 

 ideal conditions for an investigator involve 

 a large measure of freedom, just as the most 

 effective higher teaching implies opportuni- 

 ties to digress from beaten paths. 



Probablj' most of the effective scientific 

 investigation is a result of the fact that 

 some student has taken the time to digress 

 from the beaten paths at various points, 

 and finally he came into regions of unex- 

 pected fertility. Love of knowledge, not 

 love of renown, is the ideal incentive for 

 investigation. The ideal investigator is 

 not the man who says to himself "I am 

 going to become an investigator" but 

 rather the man who becomes deeply inter- 

 ested in a subject and is unable to find in 

 the literature the things he is anxious to 

 know. He is thus forced by a desire for 

 more knowledge to become an investigator. 



In some subjects there is a type of in- 

 vestigators who have been forced by a kind 

 of laziness to become investigators. I refer 

 here to the student who finds it easier to sit 

 and think than to get up and consult the 

 literature. In fact, some people have 

 gotten into the thinking habit so thor- 

 oughly that it appears generally easier for 

 them to think than to do even as much 

 manual labor as to pick up a book and 

 read. Investigators of this type have 

 sometimes developed into comparatively 

 ignorant men with great reputations, and 

 some of them have done very much to ad- 

 vance knowledge. 



