December 30, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



937 



tion, the contagion of his own love of 

 Imowledge. In no way can this be done 

 save by letting like come to like, by open- 

 ing the way from his own kind to find the 

 way to their master. In this our present 

 fellowship system is failing, and this fail- 

 ure is showing itself in the cheapening of 

 virility and the cheapening of originality 

 among our doctors of philosophy, as com- 

 pared with our young workers of a genera- 

 tion ago. 



An eminent teacher of physics said 

 lately : 



The numbers of doctor's degrees in physics bear 

 no relation to the eminence of the professors who 

 grant them. Tliey depend solely on the number 

 of fellowships offered, on the number of assist- 

 antships available. In the institution which has 

 conferred the greatest number in recent years, 

 almost every one of these is drawn by the stipend 

 offered; scarcely one by the unquestioned great- 

 ness of the leading professor. 



The primary fault seems to be in our con- 

 ception of research, which tends to point in 

 the direction of pedantry rather than that 

 of scholarship. Not all profes.sors have this 

 tendency ; only those who are neither great 

 scholars nor great teachers. It is, or 

 ought to be, a maxim of education that ad- 

 vanced work in anj^ subject has greater 

 value to the student, as discipline or as in- 

 formation, than elementary work. Thor- 

 oughness and breadth of knowledge give 

 strength of mind and better perspective. 

 They give above all courage and enthusi- 

 asm. With each year, up to a certain 

 point, our universities cany their studies 

 further toward these ends, and the student 

 responds to each demand made on his in- 

 telligence and his enthusiasm. 



Then research begins, and here the 

 teacher, as a matter of duty, transforms 

 himself into the pedant. Instead of a closer 

 contact with nature and her problems, the 

 student is side-tracked into some corner iu 

 which numerical exactness is possible, even 



though no possible truth can be drawn 

 from the multiplicity of facts which may 

 be gathered. 



This sort of research, recently satirized 

 by Professor Grant Showerman, in the 

 Atlantic Monthly, is not advanced work at 

 all. It may be most elementary. The stu- 

 dent of the grammar school can count the 

 pebbles in a gravel bank to see what per- 

 centage of them lie with the longest axis 

 horizontal as easily as the master can do it. 

 That is not research in geology, however 

 great the pains which may be taken to en- 

 sure accuracy. The student may learn 

 something. All contact with gravel teaches 

 something of the nature of rocks, as all 

 reading of Plautus teaches something of 

 poetry; all contact with realities gives 

 some reality as a result. Yet there is no re- 

 sult involved in the ease above indicated, 

 in the investigation itself. "We know that 

 if flat stones are free to fall, the longest 

 axis will approach horizontality, and that 

 is the end of the matter. 



Mr. Showerman 's suggested comparison 

 of the "prefixes in P. to be found in Plau- 

 tus," "the terminations in T. of Terence" 

 and "the sundry suffixes in S.," is scarcely 

 an exaggeration of the kind of work as- 

 signed to many of our research students. 

 Such work is in itself absolutely elemen- 

 tary. It teaches patience and perhaps ex- 

 actness, although, where the student finds 

 that error is just as good as truth in the 

 final round-up, he is likely to lose some of 

 "the fanaticism for veracity" which is the 

 central element in the zealous eomradery 

 of the extension of human knowledge. So 

 long as the "new work" on which our 

 doetoi's of philosophy address themselves 

 is found in material rejected by scholars 

 because a study of it can not possibly lead 

 anywhere, so long will these doctors be 

 neither teachers nor enthusiasts. They 

 will justify the clever sneer as to the turn- 



