650 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVI. No. 408'. 



and there would be no better opportu- 

 nity for the Carnegie Institution to serve 

 the whole field of science and scholarship 

 than by establishing such an institute. 

 Aksel G. S. Josephson. 



The National and State Governments are 

 now devoting considerable amounts of 

 money annually to scientific investigations, 

 the results of which promise to be of direct 

 and immediate economic value. Such in- 

 vestigations have been so far successful that 

 it is now comparatively easy to secure liber- 

 al appropriations of public funds for such 

 purposes. In our colleges and universities, 

 the professors and their assistants are indi- 

 vidually devoting themselves more and more 

 to original research and are being encour- 

 aged to do this by boards of management. 

 The funds at the disposal of these investi- 

 gators are as yet comparatively limited and 

 their amount depends very largely on the 

 personal activity of the investigator, but 

 there is nevertheless good reason to believe 

 that in the future it will grow easier for 

 such individual investigators to secure the 

 financial backing they need to make their 

 own investigations successful. And it seems 

 desirable that our institutions for higher 

 education should make the support of such 

 research a part of their regular business, 

 and should seek endowment for it in the 

 same way that they seek funds to maintain 

 their courses of instruction. 



Leaving out of account, then, economic 

 investigations supported by public funds 

 and such relatively limited researches as 

 can be conducted by individuals connected 

 with colleges and universities, there remains 

 a class of large and fundamental in- 

 vestigations which require special endow- 

 ment. With the development of science in 

 modern times it is clear that many funda- 

 mental problems cannot be satisfactorily 

 studied except by the cooperation of scien- 

 tists trained in different lines, the use of 



complicated and costly apparatus, and in- 

 vestigations conducted for a long time and 

 on a large scale. Take, for example, the 

 fundamental problems in biology regarding 

 the origin of life, or the principles underly- 

 ing the breeding and nutrition of animals. 

 Our agricultural experiment stations can 

 easily secure funds for breeding and feed- 

 ing experiments which seem likely to prom- 

 ise results of immediate practical value, and 

 they are now engaged in making numerous 

 such experiments, but it has been difficult 

 for them to devote even a small portion of 

 their funds to the more fundamental studies 

 of breeding and nutrition. Wherever they 

 have ventured to attempt these, the work 

 has as a rule been on too small a scale to 

 give the best results. Instead of the few 

 hundred dollars spent annuallj' in such 

 researches, it should be thousands of dol- 

 lars; instead of experiments with a few 

 subjects, there should be experiments with 

 a considerable number of subjects in order 

 that general rather than special conclusions 

 may be drawn from the work. 



For example, the most elaborate investi- 

 gations on the nutrition of man yet con- 

 ducted are those of Atwater with a respira- 

 tion calorimeter, in which a single subject 

 was studied during periods of three to 

 twelve days. While the results of these in- 

 vestigations have been valuable, they are 

 from the nature of the case not thoroughly 

 satisfactory. Not only should the appa- 

 ratus and methods for such investigations 

 be further improved, but there should 

 be opportunity for carrying them on 

 with a number of calorimeters at the 

 same time and for longer periods. This 

 would necessitate the expenditure of rela- 

 tively large sums of money in this kind of 

 research, but it would be money well spent, 

 for there would be a much larger chance 

 of securing some definite and final results 

 than present conditions of research in that 

 line afford. 



