Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/179

Rh of any names or language by which they may be symbolized. On the other hand, it is important to notice that things and their phenomena are grasped by the mind in the same way that words and language of common speech are learned. By study we gain knowledge of words, by investigation knowledge of the things and phenomena of our experience. The laboratory, the museum, the world at large are the normal fields of this process of investigation; much as books and the words of the lecturer are the normal fields of pure study. This brings us to the definition of research.

Original research goes beyond investigation in that the things sought for are not only undescribed, but, when the research begins, are actually out of sight, that is, unseen. The field of research may be visible, but the genuine meaning of research is a looking beyond what can be seen; herein is found the most essential characteristic of successful research, viz., a comprehensive, a keen and a disciplined imagination of things and truths before they become objects of experience. We must distinguish, too, between scientific research and haphazard stumbling upon strange things in out of the way places. Curiosity hunters may discover novel and undescribed things, and may even point the way to their source, but it is the trained scientific investigator who discriminates their true value, orients them in the known world of things and makes them available for the use of man.

Research, as was noted at the outset, is not a special faculty possessed by a few, but a common faculty specially trained and systematically exercised by but the few, for whom it becomes a tool of the highest value, and the means of opening up new fields of knowledge to mankind.

The underlying principle of original research is simple inquisitiveness; that trait so characteristic of the Yankee and the fox. I use the term Yankee as the name for a typical American, not a local or political term, but the name for the smart, shrewd, inventive man, who depends upon his own resources and, if without learning or education, still succeeds in penetrating untried fields, and in making headway under all manner of reverses, hindrances and difficulties, always exhibiting a quickness to observe differences and to interpret the meaning of things. All kinds of successful pioneers are made of such stuff.

This quality is generally more active in youth than in grown men; the common methods of education repress rather than encourage its activity; and the old classical system of education is particularly effective in this direction. This repressing result is reached, however, not by direct means, but by the very perfection with which study, pure and simple, is fostered. It is a conspicuous fact in schools that often the keenest and brightest boy is not always the best student; he may know more and observe more closely than any other, but he gets low marks in spelling, reading and, may be, in arithmetic, even in geography as