1300 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts, and Letters. 
resents the timber out of which real investigators are made 
this will not necessarily he the case. The endowment of in¬ 
stitutions of scientific research will no doubt do much to foster 
inquiry; hut men cannot be properly trained except through 
the influence of educational institutions of proper type and 
scope. In practice the work of enlisting men and women in 
scientific pursuits falls almost entirely upon universities, from 
which special research laboratories draw their supply of inves¬ 
tigators. For this reason the universities are really the prime 
factor in scientific advances. A university professor by failing. 
to enlist students of proper caliber to make the pursuit of 
science their life work, seriously hampers the progress of scien¬ 
tific research. It is well known that bright students who 
choose medicine, engineering, law or a practical career in busi¬ 
ness generally become engrossed with these pursuits and are 
unavailable for scientific researches. It is also true that the 
financial outlook in these lines is very alluring as compared 
with that of the one who chooses a career as scientist, and so 
in fact, science loses a large proportion of those that are by 
nature fitted to do research work. A person preparing himself 
for 'scientific work outside of the professions of medicine and 
engineering still very commonly has to associate himself with 
an educational institution—a university, technical school, or 
college. The life of a teacher is, however, not specially at¬ 
tractive to many of excellent native ability, for the work is 
hard and the salary is relatively small. And so the university 
professor has a difficult task before him in recruiting the ranks 
of future investigators. It is, moreover, a question whether 
the pensioning of university professors and thus making them 
quasi objects of charity will really serve to draw more promis¬ 
ing men into university careers. 
!N]ow it must be realized that much excellent scientific in¬ 
quiry is going on outside of the walls of the laboratories of uni¬ 
versities and technical schools, but this work quite commonly 
deals with problems of applied science and is not directed 
toward the unearthing of new principles. This means that 
it is really not calculated to open up new avenues of research. 
