- SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY.- 
vast majority of their customers are ignorant of the fact that they 
expend money on research, and are, indeed, ignorant of what scien- 
tific research means. We are driven to assume that they do it because 
it pays, and pays most handsomely. Great indeed must be the reward- 
which they have reaped from this policy, if firms in which business 
efficiency is carried to its utmost extreme are nevertheless willing to 
employ hundreds of men, and some at high salaries, to-perform work 
the details of which they can but feebly apprehend, and which is not 
directly connected in any way with the daily output of the factory or 
the office. 
To this the old-fashioned manufacturer has always two answers 
ready. The first is that he does do research—every manufacturing 
firm is seeking to improve its output, and that effort does, in fact, 
involve and constitute research. The second rather contradictory 
reply is that he-has tried research, and it doesn’t pay. 
Both of these replies arise out of a total misconception of what 
modern scientific and industrial research implies. Profitable research, 
whether profitable in the material sense or for the sheer advancement 
of knowledge, is not to be done, nowadays, by untrained individuals, 
by people who have “ picked up” a “ practical” training in the works. 
A long preliminary training in research methods—in the technique 
of finding out new things—is an absolutely essential perquisite to suc- 
cess. The time has passed when fundamentally important industrial 
discoveries can be made by the lazy boy of the factory who ties two 
parts of a machine together with a piece of string, or by the operative 
who forgets to remove the fabric from the stretching machine over- 
night, and so discovers the process of mercerization. That day is past; 
it is Karly Victorian, and it is extinct. To-day, as Pasteur has said, 
“Chance favours only the prepared mind.” — : 
Where are we to get these “prepared minds’? Obviously the 
only place from which they can come is the institution of higher 
training, the University. But do the students of our universities 
actually acquire training in the technique of finding out new things? 
And this leads us to the second objection, that the shortly-to-be-bygone 
manufacturer propounds, the objection that he has tried resedrch, 
and that it does not pay. An incident which came to my notice while 
filling the Chair of Biochemistry at Toronto will serve to illustrate 
the origin of this objection. A certain individual had been recom- 
mended to a-leading firm of manufacturers as a suitable person to 
conduct research, and the question of his appointment was, with un- 
usual wisdom, referred to the Research Council of Canada. The reply 
chanced to pass through my hands, and it was to the effect that the 
Council did not recommend the appointment, because the man in 
question had not yet made a mark in research as a student in his 
‘University, and instances were numerous of failures and disappoint- 
ment due to the employment of men “who have not cut their eye- 
teeth in this matter of research.” That is the key to the whole 
difficulty. A chemical problem arises and a “chemist” is employed 
to solve it, irrespectively of whether he has ever “cut his eye-tecth ” 
in the matter of research or not, and of course without any regard 
whatever to the question of whether the University in which he was 
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