988 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVJ. No. 416 



proposals lie near to the founder's heart, 

 enough of them to exhaust most of the avail- 

 able resources. One thus feels some hesi- 

 tancy in making suggestions, for fear the 

 trustees are committed in piety to all they 

 can ' broadly and liberally ' carry forward. 



But there is one possible group of enter- 

 prises of no little importance, that has re- 

 ceived little direct mention. There are, 

 namely, a number of scientific undertakings, 

 some highly interesting in theory, some vitally 

 useful in practice, and many both the one and 

 the other, that can hardly be entered into by 

 university teachers, and can be entered into 

 by other scientists only under great disad- 

 vantages. At least this is true uxider present 

 conditions, and will continue to be true until 

 some broadly founded and liberally managed 

 institution shows, by successful example, how 

 such tilings should be done. 



I refer to broad, complex, and, in many 

 instances, very practical problems, whose solu- 

 tion depends in each case on the accumula- 

 tion and skilled synthesis and re-synthesis of 

 data falling within the fields of a number of 

 different sciences. It is true that all sciences 

 are compelled in these days to poach on their 

 neighbors' preserves. But in some cases the 

 facts must be sought, not mainly in one do- 

 main, and only exceptionally in others, but 

 about equally in a number of different scien- 

 tific domains, and they can be properly gath- 

 ered from each domain and digested only by 

 men of special aptitude and training. For 

 an investigation of this type there is need of 

 a force of workers, each skilled in a par- 

 ticular science, and all organized and co- 

 operating for a common end, a condition that 

 does not exist in universities, and exists only 

 rarely and to a limited extent in other scien- 

 tific foundations. Such organized bodies of 

 men are needed to deal with the problems of 

 temperance, of crime, of marriage and di- 

 vorce, of pauperism, etc., and also to deal 

 with the broader problems of ethics, within 

 whose scope all these problems and many 

 more are included. They are also needed by 

 anthropology, in the broadest sense of the 

 word, by sociology — which will probably never 

 be a science till the need is supplied — and, 



finally, by metaphysics, to which the same re- 

 mark applies. 



The greatest defect of science is probably 

 lack of organization, and until the defect is 

 remedied, large investigations cannot be suc- 

 cessfully undertaken. Its realm is no doubt 

 minutely subdivided, like, say, the land of 

 France, so that each worker enthusiastically 

 farms his own little patch. But specialization 

 is only one factor in organizatiop, not the 

 whole of it. Mutual aid, cooperation among 

 workers is the other indispensable factor, and 

 of that little is to be found among scientific 

 men. The amount of highly trained brain 

 substance that is used up in activities that 

 merely call for the intelligence of a clerk, or 

 even of a machine, is simply appalling. 

 Little more than a dozen investigators at 

 our universities have a clerk or stenographer, 

 and I know" of none who has at his dis- 

 posal specialists' in other scientific depart- 

 ments. Each attends to all his needs, from 

 blacking his boots and writing with his hand, 

 to gathering all his facts, with the aid of a 

 few advanced students in the most favored 

 cases, and thinking out his conclusions. Pro- 

 fessor Miinsterberg is right in asking larger 

 salaries for scientific workers, though their 

 portion in this respect is not intolerable. 

 But their acute financial need is not private, 

 but official; they need money to put into their 

 work and make it truly efiicient; to pay for 

 labor-saving devices, to buy equipment, to 

 hire clerks, to employ well-trained specialists 

 as assistants. Science is organized as indus- 

 try was during the later Middle Ages, when 

 each smith hammered at his own forge, and 

 every other worker labored alone, or with a 

 few apprentices, at his workshop. It should 

 be organized, at least for attack on the larger 

 problems, as industry is to-day, where one 

 organization, by the aid of many devices and 

 of all necessary experts, begins with the raw 

 material and ends with the finished product. 

 Naturally, scientific organization will have its 

 own problems, and it can not hope for a 

 long time to be by any means as complete 

 as industrial organizations, but a beginning 

 should be made as soon, and under as favor- 

 able conditions, as possible. It is about as 



