Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/315

Rh under diverse environment. Only Darwin could show with the demonstration of ten thousand instances that this condition was naturally inevitable, that the origin of species was written in the very nature of things set in the creation of life.

As causal interpretation in weak hands degenerates into speculation, so are all other forms of research subject to deterioration. Experimenters are peculiarly subject to myopia, shortsightedness, narrowness, carelessness as to truth obtained in other ways, and indifference to the outlooks a broader horizon obtains. With all the intensive accuracy of the science of Germany, we have often to look to other countries, notably to England, for the broader view which sets each fact in place.

Systematic or descriptive work often finds its end in pedantry, the accumulation or the ostentation of meaningless knowledge, or in the forming of useless names and the gathering of pointless statistics. The work of setting in order often slides downward through easy stages of copying, compiling and dictionary work, work designed to 'hold the eel of science by the tail,' but which sometimes retains only the slime from that vivacious fish. Ecology too easily falls into sentimental personification of living organisms, not the study of Nature, but the cultivation of our own emotions regarding her. Inventive science degenerates into management of properties and science is lost in the search for salaries for holding down a job. For in engineering there is a subtle line, easily passed, which separates the comrade in zeal from the successful superintendent of a mine or foreman of a machine shop, just as in pure science there is a narrow line which distinguishes advance in knowledge from the simple keeping of what is already in our possession.

We must all rejoice in the steady increase of means for work in America, the multiplication of libraries, laboratories, museums, instruments of precision and facilities for publication, made ready to our hand. These will increase the output in science; they will improve its quality; but they will have little effect on the actual number of investigators.

I am forced to believe that investigators can not be made by opportunity only—merely made better. Not many who would have been investigators have been deterred by scanty means, by burden of work, by lack of encouragement. The impulse of the investigator, as his reward, must be within himself. His results may be incomplete, his product scanty, his outlook narrow, but he will not fail to bring forth after his own kind. A stalk of corn in stony soil may yield but little grain, but what there is will still be corn. You can not starve it down to oats nor feed it till it becomes a banana. I have no faith in the men who might have been productive investigators if they only had a