August 3, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



143 



entirely to research would be a violation of trust 

 funds supporting his chair. 



Certainly, in my opinion, every person connected 

 with an educational institution should give some 

 instruction, and I think it would be well if the 

 heads of departments should have some hand in 

 the teaching of at least one elementary class. 

 It would tend to keep at least one foot on the 

 earth. 



A correspondent says: 



There are many problems of research which re- 

 quire a great deal of time-consuming work in the 

 preparation of material for the study. I believe 

 they ought to have help in the nature of assistants 

 to do a great deal of this kind of work in pre- 

 paring the material for study and investiga- 

 tion. A professor of horticulture or agriculture 

 is not required to plow his ground, cultivate and 

 harvest his crops. He is given help to do this. 

 He plans the research, oversees perhaps the 

 preparation of the ground and the cultivation and 

 the harvesting, but makes his study from the re- 

 sults of this' manual labor which has been done 

 by others. I believe similar help should be 

 given to professors engaged in research in some 

 of the lines of biological work. 



Another says: 



Regarding the relation of research to instruc- 

 tion, I feel very strongly that no instructor of 

 upper classmen in a university should teach a 

 subject if he has not come to know the values 

 of its elements through testing some of them 

 under new conditions. Even if the instructor be 

 considered apart from his chosen field, simply as 

 an instrument for the stimulation of the thinking 

 power, he is not in a position to teach his sub- 

 ject unless he has some acquaintance with creative 

 work. If I am correct in this view, it would 

 be true that professors engaged in research have 

 also a very important work to perform in instruc- 

 tion. 



^ Another says: 



I believe that at least half the time of every 

 professor should be definitely set aside for re- 

 search, provided said professor has shown the 

 ability and energy to devote this time for such 

 purpose. The enhanced reputation which pro- 

 fessors engaged in research enjoy with their stu- 

 dents, and the more comprehensive and critical 

 value which it gives to their lectures and other 

 forms of instruction, will more than compensate 

 their institutions for the time set aside for this 

 purpose. It is not men of routine, but men of 



original ideas, who are the most stimulating to 

 students, and originality can only be generated 

 and kept alive by research. Proof of this is found 

 in the fact that the most inspiring teachers of all 

 time have been investigators. Investigation can 

 not be carried on with the brain fatigued by ex- 

 cessive teaching and excessive hours of administra- 

 tion. In many cases I believe the number of 

 lectures and recitation hours could be substantially 

 reduced with advantage both to the professors and 

 to the students in institutions where owing to 

 limited means a large corps can not be employed. 



Another says: ti 



An ideal research position, to my mind, would 

 be one in which there was some teaching, but 

 never enough to endanger the continuity of re- 

 search. 



Another says: 



I should be very sorry to see our universities 

 making any formal arrangements with their 

 officers looking toward supporting them in re- 

 search. In my judgment that would divert the 

 universities from their own proper work and 

 would give us a low grade of research. Hitherto 

 research work has been the expression of the 

 spontaneous interest and energy of the searcher, 

 and I look with suspicion on any intrusion of 

 the spirit of working for pay into this field. Yet 

 I can see that in individual instances, where it 

 is known that a man is engaged in an important 

 research, it would be wise to relieve him of some 

 portion of his other daily work. But I should 

 hope such indulgence would never go to the point 

 of making research the subject of contract. 



Another says: 



The scholarly men make the best teachers. I 

 am not at all sure that the practise of teaching 

 benefits the man of research. This would seem 

 to be the case with the direction of the research 

 of capable graduate students — but elementary 

 teaching may be not only irrelevant to the 

 scholarly interest, but distracting and fatiguing 

 to the point of the exhaustion of energy and the 

 atrophy of interest. I do feel, however, that the 

 man of research is the safest person to whom to 

 intrust the college student. Such a teacher is 

 sure to win and to merit respect, for he measures 

 himself by standards that are objective and in- 

 telligible to all. 



The teacher who is not a scholar may be a win- 

 ning and beneficent personality, but he is more 

 likely to be a self-constituted oracle whose 



