September 19, 190? 



SCIENCE. 



447 



scientific law and his use of forces and 

 energies, attain the solution of the gi-eatest 

 of the problems now confronting him. 



Scientific research is only just beginning 

 to be appreciated and to be understood, 

 even by those engaged in the great work. 

 The 'scientific metliod of advancement of 

 sciences,' as I have elsewhere called it,* is 

 hardly yet beginning to be fully recognized 

 as a method to be developed and formally 

 and systematically promoted. The organi- 

 zation of the Smithsonian, the later founda- 

 tion of the Carnegie Institution, and the ad- 

 ministrations of the scientific associations 

 generally, are hardly yet beginning their 

 real work— that of placing this fundamen- 

 tal basis of all scientific research on its 

 proper and only correct footing. The or- 

 ganization of laboratories for research is 

 only just beginning to be recognized as the 

 real economic foundation of all human pro- 

 gress in scientific and industrial fields. Here 

 and there a great mind is now coming to see 

 the opportunity that thus offers for invest- 

 ment of capital in a manner most fruitful 

 and productive of return to the world. 

 Hereafter this revelation of the scientific 

 method of the promotion of science will 

 find many Carnegies to promote the work 

 thus pioneered. 



The perfected pantology, seen from afar 

 by a few great souls, known already in some 

 details by men of genius, will take form, as 

 time passes, by the gradual collaboration of 

 science with science and of congeries of 

 sciences with other aggregations, indefinite- 

 ly. The trend is already definite and the 

 progress made, during the nineteenth 

 century alone, has been enormous. Its rate 

 has been and still remains an acceleration. 

 XIII. 



The progress of a nation, the progress 

 of the world of civilization, is coming to be 



* Vice-President's address before the American 

 Association for tlie Advancement of Science, 1878, 

 St. Louis meeting. 



seen to be dependent upon the advance- 

 ment of science by deliberate, scientific, 

 wise planning of investigation by learned 

 men, each in his chosen department. The 

 study of ' Curves of Progress '* of all the 

 various departments of human knowledge 

 and of all the material movements of mod- 

 ern life, can now be seen to promise the 

 revelation of new facts, their groupings to 

 illustrate, graphically, usually, the under- 

 lying law, and to permit the prophecy of 

 future progress and its essential and con- 

 trolling conditions. The comparison of the 

 trend of the various curves of progress of 

 intelligence, of production of trained and 

 cultured men, of the steel and the iron man- 

 ufactures, of accumulation of wealth, of 

 advances in earning power of producers, 

 of the development of a material civiliza- 

 tion and of the highest civiiizations, shows 

 very clearly the fact of a correspondence 

 amongst them all in method and rate, and 

 of acceleration of advance, and reveals the 

 law that all progress must be traced to the 

 more or less scientific development of uni- 

 versal application of scientific methods of 

 advancement of science. 



The graphical representation of the sta- 

 tistics of Mulhall, which I employed in the 

 first illustrations, the similar exhibition of 

 the constant growth of production, as, for 

 example, in the copper industry,! may be 

 used to exhibit the universal fact that all 

 real progress, materially, involves the ex- 

 tension of a market and the steady and 

 accelerated growth of production, with sjti- 

 chronous increase in the efficiency of meth- 

 ods of production through invention and 

 improved methods, the equally steady rise 

 in wages of producers availing themselves 

 of such improvements in the art, and the 

 steady decrease of costs and prices as meas- 



* ' Tiie Trend of National Progress,' North 

 American Revieio, September, 1895. — R. H. T. 



t ' The Modern Law of Supply and Demand,' 

 Science, December 4, 1896. — R. H. T. 



