Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/506

500 system at most universities, unless the student has been fortunate enough to come in contact with a teacher imbued with the spirit of research who is carrying on his own investigations, it rarely happens that he has the time or the means which would enable him to obtain any insight into the meaning of investigation before he leaves to take up teaching work. The need of post-graduate scholarships for this purpose is very widely felt, and is now frequently expressed. To insist upon such qualifications for all university students is, of course, under present conditions, impossible; but there should be no insuperable difficulty in insisting upon them for those who are to be allowed to enter a university as teachers.

Researchers are born, not made, and it is not by any means desirable that all university students should be cast adrift to make new researches and seek discoveries even under the direction of experienced teachers and investigators. This must depend to some extent upon the character of the pupil as well as of the teacher.

The mere publication of papers may mean nothing, and much that is dignified with the name of research is of no account. To turn a lad on to research, unless it be in the right spirit, may be only to set him a new exercise instead of an old one; to leave him to prosecute an investigation for himself may be to condemn him to disappointment and failure. On the other hand, to carry on any piece of work, whether it be new or old, in the zealous spirit of inquiry, with faith in a purpose, is to insure the intellectual interest of the student; and I can not see why this spirit should not animate all university education, whether it be accompanied by original research or not. The essential condition is that the chief university teachers should themselves create an atmosphere of investigation.

So deep-seated is the belief that nothing must be undertaken without a preparatory course of training that even the best and most brilliant students are frequently discouraged from undertaking a new study until they have been subjected to the mental discipline of an elementary course in it.

I can not refrain from quoting an example which came within my own experience, although I have already alluded to it in another address delivered last year.

When I was at Oxford a young Frenchman of exceptional ability, whose training had been almost exclusively literary and philosophical, and who was at the time engaged on a theological inquiry, expressed to me his regret that he had never learned to understand by practical experience the meaning of scientific work. And when I assured him that nothing was easier than to acquire practical experience by taking up a piece of actual investigation under the direction of a scientific worker, he explained to me that when he had applied for admission to scientific laboratories he had been told that it was useless to do so until