Mahaffy — The Origins of Learned Academies in Modern Europe. 443 



pronounced indispensable — I mean ' The Ttiree Shafts of Death,' as edited by 

 one of my predecessors in this dignity^a scholar and thinker whose profound 

 and brilliant services to this Academy and to this country neither his own 

 proud aloofness from the crowd, nor the envy of smaller rivals in the same 

 field, nor the interested depreciations of politician-scholars, can ever tarnish 

 or supplant. 



But even to those who are prosaic enough to hold that English is the real 

 vernacular of this country, I venture to offer a further suggestion for 

 its purification. It is with deliberate intention that 1 have not spoken of 

 "original research "as- one of the objects which an Academy should promote 

 and patronize. And my reason is that the phrase seems to me either idle or 

 misleading. In the proper sense, all research is original ; and research is not 

 to be confined to the seeking of new facts of nature, but must be extended to 

 the solution of problems suggested by these facts. In the proper sense, any 

 student who solves a mathematical problem by the application of his 

 former knowledge performs an act of reseai'ch. So does the student 

 who has the problem proposed to him of turning a piece of English into 

 correct Latin prose. He has to apply his stock of knowledge to a new 

 problem ; and in both cases the research is so far original that he does it 

 from his own store of knowledge, and his own intelligence. How strictly 

 original it is in the latter case is proved by the fact that no two attempts, 

 even by scholars of equal merit, will ever be even nearly the same. Each 

 will show variations, making it the peculiar production of its author. All 

 research, therefore, in the proper sense is original, whether it be the solving 

 of an abstract pi'oblem, the rendering of one speech by another, the finding 

 of a new planet in the abyss of space, or the cataloguing of the minutest 

 vermin that infest the solitudes of Clare Island,' provided even the last 

 depends on a method supplied by the student, or discloses to us a new law of 

 nature, even in the narrowest sense. On the other hand, if we understand 

 by original research a course of study which no other searcher has ever 

 yet attempted, then we reduce the phrase either to one of the rarest applica- 

 tion, or to the pursuit of some idle and trivial problem, of which its originality 

 is the very sign of its weakness. The great discoveries of the world are, no doubt, 

 due, if not to accident, to original research in the highest sense. But to 

 apply this phrase to the work of every student in a laboratory, set by his 

 teacher to make particular experiments, is surely to call things great and 

 small by the same name, and to give a pompous title to what is only the 



'An exhaustive catalogue of the Fauna and Flora of Clare Island, off Clew Bay, Co. Mayo, 

 now being prepared under the auspices of this Academy. 



