March 6, 1908] 



SCIENCE 



373 



Cooperation in education or research may 

 be compared with efforts as dissimilar as 

 those of an army, a swarm of bees, an ant- 

 hill after enumerating all of its denizens, 

 or the cells or cell-complexes of that unit 

 that we biologists know as an individual 

 animal or plant. 



Every professor having to do with grad- 

 uate instruction exemplifies a simple type 

 of cooperative alliance in his relations with 

 students: sometimes stating a problem, en- 

 couraging them with a nod of appreciation, 

 or setting them to thinking by a sug- 

 gestive question in the Sprechstunde to 

 which association with them is limited, 

 while they are left to fight out their own 

 salvation at other times; sometimes being 

 brain and ganglion to their muscle, and 

 himself doing all but the mechanical parts 

 of their thesis majors; occasionally, per- 

 haps, drawing equally facts, inspiration 

 and reputation from their surpassing ini- 

 tiative, energy and success— and then pos- 

 sibly being even more than an incubus. 



There maybe good administrative reasons 

 why a research department should not show 

 seeming narrowness of vision and purpose ; 

 but there is a great chance, in a department 

 blessed with armies of capable graduates, 

 to distribute between them the details of a 

 hroad study, the blocking out and accom- 

 plishment of which marks its architect as 

 a master in the truest sense. 



May I suggest that cooperation— the 

 mention of which instinctively sets us to 

 thinking of enlisting for our own purposes 

 the effort of remote workers — may some- 

 times at least, like charity, begin at home; 

 and that many of the good theses which 

 now appear to the average critic as disso- 

 ciated from one another, and without ob- 

 vious environmental relation, can be given 

 thus an excellent ecological meaning? 



People with a capacity for business or- 

 ganization see that this simple type of co- 

 operation might reach much farther if the 



various graduate schools of biology were 

 further to differentiate and coordinate 

 their respective effort. It is safe to say 

 that the students of a given department, 

 in which they stay for only a few years, 

 can effect such a coordinated and coopera- 

 tive attack on the several parts of a large 

 and divisible problem only by chance or a 

 miracle; but the result is quite within the 

 power of the permanent heads of depart- 

 ments, if they are willing to take it up and 

 desire to do so. 



Popular interest in biology to-day cen- 

 ters about the plant or animal as a mechan- 

 ism, the plant or animal in action, rather 

 than as illustrating that abstract concept 

 called, sometimes sarcastically and usually 

 vaguely, a species. Illustrations of intra- 

 departmental cooperation are afforded by a 

 few of the great morphological and physi- 

 ological laboratories, and in the studies 

 which Bateson is having made in genetics 

 and Pearson in biometrics. Who can 

 doubt that we who admire the great men 

 who edit Pringslieim's Jahrhilcher are 

 really able to characterize its editors, 

 Strasburger and Pfeffer, as leaders in their 

 profession almost as much because of the 

 correlated contributory studies of their 

 pupils as from their own great investiga- 

 tions ? 



For interdepartmental cooperation, which 

 I understand is admirably exemplified in 

 current astronomical work, illustrations in 

 our own field may be taken from the now 

 unpopular— but fundamentally indispen- 

 sable — systematic branch of botany. The 

 master mind in this field to-day, Engler, 

 is exemplifying in a large way, by the pub- 

 lication of "Das Pflanzenreich, " what 

 united effort may accomplish ; and our own 

 incipient "North American Flora," under 

 Britten's editorship, has been launched on 

 the same lines — which have long been suc- 

 cessfully followed in the much simpler 

 preparation of encyclopedic matter. 



