April 22, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



647 



inventions at least are patented, and that 

 then tribute is levied in the shape of royal- 

 ties. This is true, and it is somewhat un- 

 fortunate, also, that in the majority of 

 instances the wrong man gets the royalty. 

 A law of nature is not patentable, but the 

 application is, and so it comes about that 

 the real discoverer, retiring and absorbed 

 in his science as he must be to produce his 

 intellectual marvels, is overlooked by the 

 public, overshadowed by some one who 

 happens to find a patentable application 

 of a discovery in which he took no part. 

 It is worth pondering a moment that prac- 

 tical and patentable are not synonymous 

 terms. It is far from my intention to 

 imply that the patentee does not deserve 

 his royalties; he unquestionably does, and 

 fills an important and necessary function 

 in the social economy. 



In any case, such tribute as is levied in 

 'this way is but a small fraction of the 

 worth of the invention, and the public al- 

 ways gets a good bargain. The actual 

 value, in dollars and cents, of that portion 

 of the fruits of scientific labor which is 

 given for nothing is hard to estimate, but 

 perhaps we may get a notion of it by an- 

 alyzing one specific case. Suppose some 

 one unprincipled individual obtained an 

 absolute and unquestioned monopoly of all 

 telephones to-morrow. Suppose him to be 

 under no legal restraint, and that he pro- 

 ceeded to squeeze every user of a telephone 

 as hard as possible. It is safe to predict 

 that single business firms would pay him 

 thousands of dollars, rather than lose that 

 indispensable adjunct to their facilities for 

 carrying on their work. Add together all 

 that he could possibly get in this way from 

 all over the world, and subtract from this 

 total the amount now being paid, and we 

 shall get the value of one little gift of 

 science to mankind. Is it extravagant to 

 estimate this one item, as exceeding the 



total cost of all educational institutions 

 since the dawn of civilization? 



Let me put the question in another form : 

 What is the total value of all the time saved 

 by telegrams and by our present means of 

 transportation? And again, how much 

 would you pay for enough antitoxin to 

 save your child from death by diphtheria? 

 These things are inestimable, and my orig- 

 inal statement stands proved. 



Professor Dewar drew a particularly 

 illuminating comparison about a year ago. 

 He wished 'to find out exactly what some 

 definite quantity of scientific achievement 

 has cost in hard cash. ' He found that 'the 

 total cost of a century of scientific wort 

 in the laboratories of the Royal Institution, 

 together Vith public demonstrations,' was 

 £119,800. This is the price which was paid 

 for all the achievements of Young, Davy, 

 Faraday, Tyndall and Dewar himself. No 

 wonder that Dewar reaches the conclusion 

 'that the exceptional man is about the 

 cheapest of natural products.' We may 

 sum all this up by saying that it is impos- 

 sible to fix the value of the results obtained 

 by research workers in laboratories, for the 

 simple reason that they have been the crea- 

 tors of nearly everything that makes money 

 worth having. 



And so far we have touched upon only 

 one of the two functions of our universities 

 and laboratories. The laboratory of yester- 

 day taught the engineer and the doctor, of 

 to-day, and the laboratory of to-day is 

 training the discoverer and inventor of to- 

 morrow. The value of the educational 

 work done is so generally recognized and 

 attested by the donations of private citi- 

 zens, and the constantly increasing grants 

 made by far-sighted legislative bodies, that 

 it requires no elaboration. It admits of no 

 argument that the total knowledge of the 

 human race is worth more than all the 

 money in the world. Our constant strides 

 to higher and higher planes of enlighten- 



