Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/215

Rh patient and cautious, and finally bestows the clearest intelligence and largest comprehension of phenomena. And this fatal laziness is fostered by a strange misunderstanding, a fancy, sometimes a downright conviction, that the dead-work of science can be done for us by some one else, so as to save our time and strength for speculation, for thought, for fine writing—can be done by menials, employés, assistants, colleagues, special experts, by any one rather than by ourselves. Can we not, in fact, often find it already done for us, and even better done than we could do it? Then, why not let inferior minds occupy themselves with this laborious and time-consuming address of special skill? Can we not, for instance, hire transit-men to lay out and measure our sections, and artists to draw them? Why should a paleontologist take the pencil between his own fingers in studying species, when he has trained photographers and lithographers at his command? Why waste precious weeks and months in tramping and climbing, in measuring and plotting, while glory calls us and the scientific world is impatiently waiting for our conclusions? Thus possessed by the demon of scientific haste, we continually spoil our own performances and disappoint the expectant but not at all impatient world. Could our vanity permit us to know the fact, the impatience is entirely our own, and, if indulged, is sure to be roundly punished.

No, dead-work can not be delegated. The man who can not himself survey and map his field, measure and draw his sections properly, and perfectly represent with his own pencil the characteristic variations of his fossil forms, has no just right to call himself an expert geologist. These are the badges of initiation, and the only guarantees which one can offer to the world of science that one is a competent observer and a trustworthy generalizer. Nor has one become a true man of science until he has already done a vast amount of this deadwork; nor does one continue in his prime, as a man of science, after he has ceased to bring to this test of his own ability to see, to judge, and to theorize the working and thinking of other men. But enough of this.

My second proposition was, that no teacher of science can be successful who does not himself encounter some of the dead-work of the explorer and discoverer; who does not discipline his own faculties of perception, reflection, and generalization by field-work and office-work, independently of all text-book assistance; who does not himself make at least some of the diagrams, tables, and pictures for his class-room, in as original a spirit, and with as much precision of detail, as if none such had ever been made before, and these were to remain sole monuments of the genius of investigation. What the true teacher has to do first and foremost is to wake up in youthful minds this spirit of investigation ab initio. The crusade against scholastic cramming promises to be successful; but the crusade against pedagogic cramming has hardly yet been organized. How is the scholar to be made an artist