July 21, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



71 



when discovered, an immediate practical 

 value, so much the better; but the direct 

 search for understanding has certainly 

 always proved the most effective motive 

 in scientific labors. Because of this 

 attitude the investigator should not be 

 regarded as self-centered, or neglectful of 

 duties to the general good. He is serving 

 best his own generation in so far as he 

 makes his standard of work thorough and 

 honest. In so far as he does that, he is 

 serving best future generations as well, for 

 only thus can the results of his work be 

 used later as a basis for further advance- 

 ment. And since the interrelations of phe- 

 nomena are so manifold the conviction is 

 justified that every bit of honest work can 

 finally be utilized in forming the body of 

 truth. Although the investigator may 

 labor, therefore, primarily to satisfy his 

 own curiosity, and to secure for his crafts- 

 manship that inner approval sought by 

 every conscientious worker, neverthless he 

 is making permanent additions to the 

 world's values. There is about his life, as 

 Professor Royce has noted, 

 an element of noble play. . . . One plays with silk 

 and glass and amber, with kites that one flies 

 beneath thunder clouds, with frog legs and with 

 acid. The play is a mere expression of a curiosity 

 which former centuries might have called idle. 

 But the result of this play re-creates an industrial 

 world. And so it is everywhere with our deeper 

 curiosity. There is a sense in which it is all 

 superfluous. Its immediate results seem but van- 

 ity. One could surely live without them, yet for 

 the future and for the spiritual life of mankind, 

 these results are destined to become of vast 

 import. 



Sometimes the worker in science lives to 

 see his services used for the relief of human 

 need. "When Davy's studies of combustion 

 enabled him to invent the safety lamp, he 

 gave the invention freely to the world. 

 He knew then that thenceforth for all time 

 toilers in the mines could protect them- 

 selves against the dangers of destruction. 



There is no realm, however, in which the 

 deep satisfaction of seeing discovery ap- 

 plied to human service is more likely to be 

 experienced than in the realm of medical 

 research. Consider how great must have 

 been the joy of Pasteur and of Lister when 

 they realized that the consequences of their 

 investigations must lessen forever plague 

 and pestilence and pain in men, and in the 

 lower animals as well, and must perma- 

 nently remove much of the blind struggle 

 against mysterious agencies of disease and 

 death. The letter which Walter Reed 

 wrote to his wife on New Tear's eve, 1900, 

 at the end of his experiments on the trans- 

 mission of yellow fever, tells something of 

 the joy of such service — "The prayer that 

 has been mine for twenty years," he con- 

 cludes, ' ' that I might be permitted in some 

 way or at some time to do something 

 to alleviate human suffering, has been 

 granted ! A thousand Happy New Years. ' ' 

 And a thousand happy new years there 

 will be for thousands of men and women 

 and children, because of that one research 

 in Cuba. 



Through the employment of methods of 

 scientific inquiry to medical problems more 

 progress has been made during the past 

 sixty years towards an understanding of 

 the nature of diseases and their control 

 than had been made in the previous 

 twenty-three centuries. Think for a mo- 

 ment of what has been learned about 

 diphtheria and tetanus, about meningitis 

 and rabies, about tuberculosis and syphilis, 

 about dysentery and cholera and typhoid 

 fever. How fundamentally our attitude 

 toward these diseases has altered as the 

 discoveries of medical investigators have 

 given us insight and powers to control. 

 What great progress we have already made 

 in this relatively short period towards the 

 relief of man's estate. Still we must not 

 forget that there are immense labors yet to 



