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SCIENCE 



[X. S. Vol. XXXI. Xo. 793 



any department of knowledge, does not de- 

 sire unintelligent popular applause; and 

 it is almost always safe to conclude that the 

 "newspaper scientist," the man whose 

 name and deeds are constantly before the 

 public, is not having a very great or 

 beneficial effect upon the progress of his 

 science. 



True research, real scientific pioneering, 

 does not strongly appeal to the general 

 public; its applications may be remote, it 

 shows no immediate profit, its achieve- 

 ments are not spectacular and are often 

 too technical to be fully understood by any 

 but experts. And thus it comes about that 

 it must be fostered, encouraged and sup- 

 ported by the more enlightened fraction of 

 mankind; and the chief agency through 

 which this support may be given is the 

 xiniversity or college. I will go further 

 than this and express the decided opinion 

 that no other institution has been devised 

 "Or seems likely to be invented which can 

 perform the task so well. Of late years 

 there have been established a number of 

 institutions of various types, especially for 

 research; they have done excellent work 

 and it has seemed to many that such foun- 

 dations might probably absorb gradually 

 the research functions of the universities. 

 The ground for this expectation is that, 

 as they have nothing else to do except to 

 advance knowledge, whereas the imiversi- 

 ties must also teach young men, the insti- 

 tutions for research alone must inevitably 

 surpass the universities in achievement and 

 eventually take over the whole biisiness of 

 research. We must remember, however, in 

 the first place, that research is not alto- 

 gether a business, but an art as well; and 

 that while organization and division of 

 labor may be the life of business, it is not 

 the soul of art. To produce the highest 

 results in scientific research there must be 

 individuality and freedom, and there is 



room for far more individuality in a uni- 

 versity laboratory than in any special re- 

 search laboratory which has hitherto been 

 established or seems likely to be estab- 

 lished. 



There is a certain sort of new knowledge 

 which can be gained more readily by the 

 well-organized, machine-like attack of gov- 

 ernment departments and special institu- 

 tions than by the guerilla warfare of the 

 universities. There are great bodies of 

 facts, relations, properties of matter, and 

 habits of living beings which have only to 

 be looked for to be found; as soon as we 

 have time, money, a corps of trained men, 

 and especially proper organization, we 

 may count upon a steady annual crop of 

 new knowledge of this kind. Institutions 

 of the type we have been discussing are 

 doing admirable service to science by 

 pushing forward such work. It seems, a 

 priori, almost inevitable that their work 

 should be mainly in this direction ; it is the 

 work for which their organization is best 

 fitted— and it is a sure thing. When an 

 institution exists solely for research, when 

 a man gets his salary for research alone, 

 then the results must appear pretty regu- 

 larly and promptly, or there is likely to be 

 trouble. The institution, or the man, knows 

 that he must reckon with human nature— 

 especially with the human nature of ad- 

 ministrative officers; and in consequence 

 we find (as we should expect) that, in nine 

 cases out of ten, the productions under 

 siich conditions are very steady, very 

 voluminous, very meritorious and very 

 dull. Now the collection of facts of this 

 kind is most necessary, but it is only "the 

 beginning of wisdom" in science; such 

 collections are not science but only the 

 raw material out of which science may 

 possibly be made if the right men arise for 

 the task. It is here that the university 

 laboratory, that the college professor, has 



