December 30, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



935 



of Comparative Anatomy had forty years 

 ago. Victor Mayer is reported to have 

 said that the equipment of every chem- 

 ical laboratory should be burned once in 

 ten years. This is necessary tliat the chem- 

 ical investigator should be a free man, 

 not hampered by his outgrown environ- 

 ment. In like vein, Eigenmann has said 

 that when an investigator dies, all his ma- 

 terial should be burned with him. These 

 should be his creation, and he should cre- 

 ate nothing which he can not use. These 

 could be useful to none other, except as 

 material for the history of science. There- 

 fore, too much may be worse than too little. 

 The struggle for the necessary is often the 

 making of the investigator. If he gets 

 what he wants without a struggle, he may 

 not know what to do with it. 



For facilities do not create. The men 

 who have honored their universities owe 

 very little to the facilities their universi- 

 ties have offered them. Men are born, not 

 made. They are strengthened by en- 

 deavor, not by facilities. Facilis descensus. 

 It is easy to slide in the direction of least 

 resistance. That direction is not upward. 

 It is easj- to be swamped by material for 

 work, or by the multiplicity of cares, or by 

 the multiplication of opportunities. I may 

 be pardoned for another personal allusion. 

 I have spent the best portion of my life in 

 the service of science, but for the most part 

 not in direct service. I have tried to help 

 others to opportunities I could not use 

 myself. I have been glad to do this, be- 

 cause that which I might have done has 

 been far more than balanced by the help I 

 have been able to give to others. 



But it is not clear that this greater help 

 has led to greater achievement. I can not 

 find that the output bears anj' direct rela- 

 tion to the means for producing it. The 

 man who is born to zeal for experiment or 

 observation can not be put down. He is 



always at it. Somewhere or somehow he 

 will come to his own. No man ever adds 

 much to the sum of human knowledge be- 

 cause the road is made easy for him. Leis- 

 ure, salary, libraries, apparatus, prol)lems, 

 appreciation, none of these will make an 

 investigator out of a man who is willing to 

 be anything else. There is human nature 

 among scientific men, and human nature is 

 prone to follow the lines of least resistance. 

 It takes originality, enthusiasm, abound- 

 ing life, to turn any man from what is 

 easily known to that which is knowable 

 only through the sweat of the intellect. Of 

 all the men I have tried to train in biology, 

 those five I regard as ablest because of 

 their contributions to science have been 

 greatest, were brought up out of doors or 

 within bare walls in which books, speci- 

 mens and equipment were furnished from 

 the scant salary. A struggling teacher, a 

 very young teacher at that, at $1,800 per 

 year, and ten per cent, of this for a bio- 

 logical library, is not a condition to attract 

 advanced students to-day, but so far as my 

 own experience has gone, I have never 

 known stronger students than those who 

 came to me to be trained under these 

 pinching conditions. To-day these condi- 

 tions are adjusted to the promotion of the 

 docile student rather than the man of orig- 

 inal force. He goes not to the man but the 

 university. He finds work in biology, no 

 longer a bit of gi'een sod under the blue sky 

 shut off b}^ conventional and uglj' hedges, 

 and therefore to be acquired at any cost. 

 It is a park, open on everj'' side to anybody. 

 Or, dropping the poor metaphor, he finds 

 his favorite work not a single hard-won 

 opportunity in a mass of requii'od language 

 and mathematics. He finds the university 

 like a great hotel with a menu so varied 

 that he is lost in the abundance. His fav- 

 orite zoology or botany is not taught by a 

 man. It is divided into a dozen branches 



