Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/376

362 original work involves a pecuniary sacrifice, and the temptation must, in some instances, be strong to withdraw entirely, or for long intervals, from the real work of scientific research—even if this may not become, in many cases, an absolute duty.

Another source of remuneration for scientific workers depends on the value of scientific knowledge in certain departments of commercial enterprise. This means of support, however, though large in individual instances, is so limited in scientific range, that we need not stop to consider it in connection with the general question of support from workers in science. As Mr. Appleton justly remarks, "this source of maintenance is not only the exclusive privilege of physical science, but almost the exclusive privilege of one of the physical sciences. There is no commercial career open for a biologist, for instance; and the existence of a commercial career—and frequently a very lucrative one—for the chemist has the effect of starving all the other sciences for the benefit of one of them. One of our foremost teachers of biology complained to me not long ago that he was compelled to advise his best pupils, who were desirous of devoting themselves to a life of research, to give up their own study, and enter upon that of chemistry, as there was no prospect of a career for them in any thing else."

I have not spoken thus far of salaried offices which are apparently scientific but in reality involve continuous labor not tending greatly to the advancement of pure science. Such, for example, in astronomy, are the various offices, ruling as well as subordinate, in our great government observatories. The details of observatory-work are not, properly speaking, scientific. They involve, no doubt, the continuous application of scientific principles, but no such processes as are likely to lead to discoveries in science. The ordinary notion, for instance, that the large telescopes of our national observatories are employed in advancing our knowledge of astronomy, is altogether erroneous, as any one will perceive who examines the records of the work done in those observatories. All the original researches effected at Greenwich, since Flamsteed's time, would together form little more than a fair life's work for a single zealous student of astronomy, and would be incomparably surpassed in scientific interest by the work of either of the Herschels. The object for which government observatories are erected, in fact, precludes almost entirely the pursuit of original researches. The observations of the moon, for instance, which have formed so important a part of the work accomplished at Greenwich since Flamsteed's time, were not intended to add to our information about the physics of astronomy, though, of course, they have done so in a remarkable degree, studied as they have been by mathematicians (mostly outside Greenwich) from Newton downward. Their ostensible object was the improvement of navigation; and almost every observation made at Greenwich, until quite recently, was directed either to