February, ’20] 
O’KANE: PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 
51 
papers, sign reports. Presently it is evening and the day is done. In 
the course of this we have, occasionally, done some real thinking. But 
it has not been so continuous or so deep as to strain our mental 
faculties. 
The scientist, in the investigational phase of his day's work, must 
learn to do better than this if he is to stand in good repute. The 
road by which he may surely arrive at scientific truth bears little re¬ 
semblance to the sketchy path ordinarily followed in reaching conclu¬ 
sions, even his own, outside of science. People in general do not actu¬ 
ally think out statements of fact. Select ten newspapers. Toss a 
statement through them to ten hundred thousand readers. It will be 
gulped down promptly and completely, like so much breakfast food. 
We all do it. Start a rumor and you can watch it grow into fact before 
your astonished eyes. Not all people impose thus on themselves all 
of the time, but some of them do it all of the time and all of us do it 
some of the time. If, in addition, the supposed facts are fed on senti¬ 
ment their health and strength are doubly assured. Falsehoods swal¬ 
lowed as facts are causing acute indigestion in the labor world today. 
In the words of Josh Billings, “ Tain’t what men don’t know that makes 
trouble in the world; it’s what they know for sartan that ain’t so.” 
Even experience seldom furnishes complete and reliable data. It 
may readily afford isolated facts but the causes of those facts may 
remain totally obscure or completely misinterpreted. The observations 
that make up experience usually lack the precision that is a necessity 
in genuine scientific work. They are not planned to secure continuity. 
They are not marked by that freedom from personal bias which is 
essential in a clear-cut search for truth. The observer has seldom the 
foundation of apperceptive data in the light of which alone can find¬ 
ings be properly weighed and measured. On the contrary, related 
facts are likely to be faulty. A king of England, a good enough king, 
once asked the Royal Society to investigate the reason why, when 
you place a live fish in a bucket of water, you do not thereby increase 
the weight of the vessel of water. The members of the society replied 
by correcting the fact. 
All of which serves to point out the mental stimulation that is a 
happy by-product of investigational studies. Real thinking may be 
somewhat unusual, but it is quite an available process, in the exercise 
of which one’s mind is inevitably quickened. The methods of research 
are good standards to carry over into other phases of daily life. 
Consciously or unconsciously we follow a rather definite procedure 
in every piece of genuine investigational study. It begins with the 
stimulus of an unsolved problem. Thence it proceeds through suc¬ 
cessive orderly steps which include the isolation of a specific question 
