414 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 



DEMOCRATS AND ARISTOCRATS IN SCIENTIFIC 

 RESEARCH 



By Dr. ESMOND R. LONG 



University of Chicago 



MOTIVES, methods, and enthusiasm in approaching and con- 

 ducting scientific research certainly are as widely different as 

 those in any other form of public endeavor. This is perhaps obvious 

 enough to those accustomed to think in research terms. The public at 

 large, it may be said, does not think in such terms, and has an indistinct 

 notion as to what scientific research is. And this is not to be wondered 

 at, for the public at large is not in the habit, not to mention the mood, 

 of following scientific publications and so is largely dependent for its 

 information upon a daily press, out of its depth entirely where science 

 and exact truths are concerned. Much of the press knows a great 

 scholar and gentleman, William Osier, chiefly, if not solely, for a 

 chance, half-chaffing remark on longevity. In guileless simplicity it 

 hails an untried adventurer sailing for southern seas in search of the 

 "missing link" as a new Darwin, and it will continue in sublime ignor- 

 ance of the stupendous amount of scientific material submitted to a 

 critical world by that retiring but superhumanly able observer, to re- 

 gard the distinguished biologist as the one original "monkey man" 

 of all time. 



Yet a public so educated, even with the movie scientist as the proto- 

 type of the species, dimly classifies research men into two groups. 

 The one, alert to the present, includes the physician driving with all the 

 power of his trained mind toward the achievement of a "cure" for one 

 of mankind's maladies, and the engineer or botanist contriving methods 

 which will make the desert blossom as a rose. In the other, we find 

 an irresponsible person, perhaps damned with faint praise as an in- 

 tellectual, given to investigating minute details of unimportant subjects, 

 fussy and irritable if disturbed in his meditations or laboratory pro- 

 cedures, and prone to have beautiful if undeserved daughters, popular 

 and addicted to the habit of staying out late nights. And after all, with 

 some modifications, the classification holds, if one deserts the movies 

 and views the latter creature on his own plane. It is this group, the 

 science-for its-own-sake and knowledge-as-its-own-reward crowd, that 

 we may designate as the aristocrats of science, in contradistinction to 

 that other class, impatient, often as closely altruistic as it is given to 

 man to be, who from their ardent endeavors in the direction of popular 



