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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIV. No. 882 



eastern universities to comprehend the 

 vital impoi'tanee of encouraging productive 

 scholarship. Business men as a rule have 

 only a vague idea of the reasons for pro- 

 moting and encouraging research and uni- 

 versity trustees greatly need enlightenment 

 on this subject. The mention of the word 

 "investigation" suggests "mysteries," 

 while research is looked upon in the light 

 of a luxury carried on by professors as a 

 pleasant relaxation from the ordinary 

 drudgery of routine duties. This miscon- 

 ception of the spirit that dominates the 

 investigator is a transmitted product of 

 the times when the general public was satis- 

 fied to accept the fii-st half of the definition 

 of "universitj'" given in the dictionary; 

 namely, "an institution devoted to teach- 

 ing." 



Eecently the reading public has reopened 

 the dictionary and has found there is a 

 second hitherto forgotten clause, "and to 

 the higher branches of learning." Learn- 

 ing and teaching, if either one is to be suc- 

 cessful, can not be disassociated. The in- 

 vestigator is a "learner" and teaching, if 

 it is not to degenerate into dogmatism, a 

 mere -cramming of the memory with in- 

 formation, must be thoroughly inoculated 

 with the spirit of youth. The instructor, 

 who, in the ordinary sense of the word, is a 

 teacher, an imparter of information, and 

 one never having actually engaged in re- 

 search, loses his mental plasticity at a much 

 earlier age than the investigator. The 

 spirit of eternal youth is the impetus and 

 moving force of the great investigator. He 

 is neither satisfied nor quiesced by the mere 

 commands of authority. The apple falls 

 from the tree, the pendulum swings in the 

 cathedral, the blood leaves the heart, cir- 

 culates through the body and returns to 

 this organ, and his eyes are first to see these 

 phenomena. He needs no ' ' letter from the 

 blind to those who can not see" to arouse 



his perceptive faculties. His sympathies 

 are with the healthy child, whose interest 

 in the universe has not been impaired by 

 teachers competent only to impart informa- 

 tion and coustantl.y irritated bj^ the "why" 

 of irrepressible and impressionable j'outh. 

 He does not discourage any attempt to 

 look at the universe from Aristotelian or 

 Platonic point of view, but admonishes the 

 student to be himself rather than a mere 

 pocket edition of the classics. 



The basic principle underlying culture, 

 expressed in the affirmation "no one is alto- 

 gether right and no one altogether wrong, ' ' 

 is the working creed of the investigator. 

 His attitude of mind makes him instinct- 

 ively reject as spurious the cultural spe- 

 cifics hawked in the market-place as cures 

 for all the ills to which human flesh is heir. 

 The invidious distinctions occasionally 

 drawn bj'^ teachers, between those subjects 

 which have a supposedly higher cultural 

 value and those of more strictly utilitarian 

 merit do not exist. The mental mechan- 

 ism determining the individual possession 

 of culture is merely an index of the func- 

 tional capacity of the brain and nervous 

 system. The factors upon which this mech- 

 anism depends are largely the product of 

 racial and ancestral traits. Too much at- 

 tention is frequently given to the infinites- 

 imal influence of education in the supposed 

 dissemination of these particular mental 

 traits, while some educators are actually in 

 danger of reducing the pursuit of culture 

 to a fad. By proclaiming too vociferously 

 the specific virtue of certain remedies, they 

 not only expose the fallacies in the argu- 

 ment, but like the parvenu who continu- 

 ally harps upon the advantage of aristoc- 

 racy, they make public confession of the 

 absence in their own cases of the hereditary 

 factors essential in the acquisition of cul- 

 ture. These same persons, says President 

 R. S. Woodward, "having drunk deeply at 



