Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/317

 and the great flood of dammed up opportunities that broke loose when this chance offered itself is a matter of record. This endowment, vast as it seemed to any individual, proved to be a mere pittance as compared with the pressing needs of research in America. To choose among these needs was bewildering, and no committee could choose wisely in every instance. But whether the choosing was wise or not has nothing to do with the impressive illustration afforded of the pressing needs of research even in its present stage of development. There is no need at present of a fund. to stimulate research; what it needs just now is opportunity.

What Mr. Carnegie was brought to see, the intelligent American public must be brought to see, for one institution and one board of control can not hope to meet the need. The appeal to American interest is utility, and there is no need to blink the fact. If our relief, therefore, is to come from American interest, we must tell the public what we are doing and of what service it may be; and this is to be done, as I have shown, without any change in our subjects or methods of research. I may say in passing, however, that it has long seemed to me wise to select among profitable subjects of investigation, which are included in our immediate interest, those that may have some bearing upon human interests. Nothing is lost by such a choice, and investigation is strengthened thereby in public estimation. I have not the slightest sympathy with those who select subjects for public effect; but I have also no sympathy for those who avoid them when they come in the natural sequence of work.

Why should not the public expect some tangible service from the large body of men best equipped to render it? This is the question I was asked by a prominent business man. whom I was trying to interest in a botanic garden, and after I had explained that such an equipment would make certain important investigations possible that could not be undertaken without it. One may inveigh against this utilitarian point of view, but that it exists is a fact, and it does not alter a fact to despise it. Should it have been expected that this business man would break suddenly with the training of a lifetime, even when a botanic garden with an alluring corollary of experiments was presented suddenly to his vision? It was impossible to educate this particular man in a short time, but had he heard over and over again, for he is interested in horticulture, that the very experiments proposed made possible a better horticulture, he would not have asked such a question. An appreciation of the utility of purely scientific investigations must get into the atmosphere. An atmosphere of appreciation can be created for such non-utilitarian things as music and art, even in a commercially saturated environment, but it is not by keeping still about them or by only revealing them to the cult.