Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/750

730 the research accomplished, either in our own country or in Europe, has been done by university or college professors, in the intervals between their regular duties, as an incidental matter, and usually with meagre appliances. Two results have followed: first, much wasting of individual energy; and, secondly, a lack of coherence in the knowledge won. The data of science become unsystematic, scattered, full of gaps and breaks, more like an archipelago than a continent. A thousand investigators, working independently and with but casual reference to each other, may discover a vast number of important facts, advance many useful arts, and yet accomplish but little for definite, exact, systematic, coherent science. The world gains much by their labors, but only a tithe of what it might gain were those labors wisely aided and fostered. For the present state of affairs, however, nobody is to blame. It is probably an unavoidable incident of scientific growth. A wider public culture and a deeper public appreciation will undoubtedly correct it. Looking forward hopefully, then, we may ask how the greatest good is to be done.

That the two sciences already mentioned are much in need of material encouragement, there can be but little doubt. They are experimental sciences, requiring for their advancement expensive apparatus and materials, such as individual students cannot provide for themselves, or few universities supply. Other branches of knowledge have been better provided for. Every observatory is to a certain degree a laboratory for astronomical research; every well-arranged museum affords opportunities for the scientific naturalist; every geological survey is ostensibly an organization of investigators. But a college laboratory, full of elementary students, each calling for personal attention from the professor, can hardly supply the best means for really advanced work. To be sure, every professor ought to do something, if only to discover a single small fact a year. Even though that fact be a hopeless negative, it will still have a true scientific value. When we question Nature, every answer, whether yes or no, counts for something in the upbuilding of science. Every man who is fit to teach science at all is competent to do at least a little in this direction. A little also may be accomplished by students; such work, for example, as the determination of densities, or completing the description of simple compounds. In one laboratory special attention might be paid each year to a single class of not over-complicated substances; and the advanced students could for that class fill up some of the gaps in our knowledge. But this work, although of immense value to science, is not of the very highest order. The most important labors can scarcely be undertaken save in laboratories specially and liberally endowed for purely scientific research.

The objections which are frequently urged against the endowment