Mr. Carnegie’s Aid to Original Research.
In 1902 Mr. Andrew Carnegie, with a gift of ten million dollars, founded in Washington the Carnegie Institution for Original Research. Its president is Dr. R. S. Woodward, formerly of Columbia University, New York. One of its first enterprises was to establish at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, a station for experimental evolution directed by Dr. Charles B. Davenport. Here will be extended the remarkable experiments of Dr. Hugo de Vries, of Amsterdam, who discovered that the large-flowered evening primrose suddenly gives rise to new species. Other experiments are in progress with regard to the variability of insects, the hybridization of plants and animals. A marine biological laboratory has been established at Tortugas, Florida; and a desert botanical laboratory at Tucson, Arizona. In its grants for widely varied purposes the policy of the Institution is clear: only those inquiries are aided which give promise of fruit, and in every case the grantee requires to be a man of proved ability, care being taken not to duplicate work already in hand elsewhere, or to essay tasks of an industrial character. Experience has already shown it better to confine research to a few large projects rather than to aid many minor investigations with grants comparatively small.
Dr. R. S. WOODWARD,
President, Carnegie Institution, Washington, D. C.
One branch of the work reminds us of Mr. Carnegie’s method in establishing public libraries—the supplementing of local public spirit by a generous gift. In many cases a university or an observatory launches an inquiry which soon broadens out beyond the range of its own small funds; then it is that aid from the Carnegie Institution brings to port a ship that otherwise might remain at sea indefinitely. Let a few typical examples of this kind be mentioned:—Dudley Observatory, Albany, New York, and Lick Observatory, California, have received aid toward their observations and computations; Yerkes Observatory, Wisconsin, has been helped in measuring the distances of the fixed stars. Among other investigations promoted have been the study of the rare earths and the heat-treatment of some high-carbon steels. The adjacent field of engineering has not been neglected: funds have been granted for experiments on ship resistance and propulsion, for determining the value of high pressure steam in locomotive service. In geology an investigation of fundamental principles has been furthered, as also the specific problem of the flow of rocks under severe pressure. In his remarkable inquiry into the economy of foods, Professor W. O. Atwater, of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, has had liberal help. In the allied science of preventive medicine a grant is advancing the study of snake venoms and defeating inoculations.
At a later day the Institution may possibly adopt plans recommended by eminent advisers of the rank of Professor Simon Newcomb, who points out that analysis and generalization are to-day much more needed than further observations of a routine kind. He has also had a weighty word to say regarding the desirability of bringing together for mutual attrition and discussion men in contiguous fields of work, who take the bearings of a great problem from different points of view.
Speaking of the study of human life and society, Professor Karl Pearson is clear that both thorough training as well as sound theories are needed if research is to be fruitful. In the course of a letter to the Carnegie Institution, he says:—“Biological and sociological observations in too many cases are of the lowest grade of value. Even where the observers have begun to realize that exact science is creeping into the biological and sociological fields they have not understood that a thorough training in the new methods is an essential preliminary for effective work, even for the collection of material. They have rushed to measure or count every living form they could hit on, without having planned at the start the conceptions and ideas that their observations were intended to illustrate. I doubt whether even a small proportion of the biometric data being accumulated in Europe and America could by any amount of ingenuity be made to provide valuable results, and the man capable of making it yield them would be better employed in collecting and reducing his own material.”
Professor Edward C. Pickering, Director of the Harvard Observatory, has suggested that astronomers the world over resolve themselves into a committee of the whole for the attack of great questions, the work to be duly parcelled out among the observatories best placed and equipped for specific tasks, to the end that repetition be avoided and a single, comprehensive plan be pursued. Not only in astronomy but in every field of science such concerted attack would have great value. In engineering, for example, there are questions as to the durability of steels and other building materials, which when investigated would yield rich harvests to every practicing engineer on the globe. It may be expected that in effecting co-ordinations of this kind the Carnegie Institution will play a notable part in the science of the twentieth century.
CHAPTER XX
OBSERVATION
What to look for . . . We may not see what we do not expect to see . . . Lenses reveal worlds great and small otherwise unseen . . . Observers of the heavens and of seashore life . . . Collections aid discovery . . . Happy accidents turned to profit . . . Value of a fresh eye . . . Popular beliefs may be based on truth . . . An engineer taught by a bank swallow.
Ability to observe is an unfailing mark of an inventor or discoverer: it is quite as much a matter of the mind as of the eye. A botanist, keenly alive to varieties of hue, of form in leaves, tendrils, and petals may not give a second glance to stratifications which rivet the gaze of a geologist for hours together. Each sees what he knows about, what he is interested in, what he brings the power and desire to see. When Faraday was asked to witness an experiment he always said: “What is it that I am to look for?” He knew the importance of concentrating his attention on the very bull’s eye of a target.
How much goes to sound observing is thus stated by John Stuart Mill,—“The observer is not he who merely sees the thing which is before his eyes, but he who sees what parts the thing is composed of. One person, from inattention, or attending only in the wrong place, overlooks half of what he sees; another sets down much more than he sees, confounding it with what he imagines, or with what he infers; another takes note of the kind of all the circumstances, but being inexpert in estimating their degree, leaves the quantity of each vague and uncertain; another sees indeed the whole, but makes such an awkward division of it into parts, throwing into one mass things which require to be separated, and separating others which might more conveniently be considered as one, that the result is much the same, sometimes even worse than if no analysis had been attempted at all.”
How an explorer of ability may witness a new fact without realizing that it points to a great industry, is shown in the case of Lord Dundonald. In 1782, or thereabout, near Culross Abbey in Scotland, he built a tar-kiln. Noticing the inflammable nature of a vapor arising during the distillation of tar, the Earl, by way of experiment, fitted a gun-barrel to the eduction pipe leading from the condenser. On applying fire to the muzzle, a vivid light blazed forth across the waters of the Frith, distinctly visible on the opposite shore. Soon afterward the inventor visited James Watt at Handsworth, near Birmingham, and told him about the gas-lighting at the kiln, but his host paid no attention to the matter. His assistant, William Murdock, however, was impressed by the story, and some years later applied gas to the illumination of the Soho works where Watt’s engines were built. This was the beginning of gas-lighting as a practical business.
Professor Adam Sedgwick, of Cambridge University, famous as a geologist, and Charles Darwin once took an excursion in Wales amid markings of extraordinary interest which neither of them noticed. Darwin tells us: “I had a striking instance of how easy it is to overlook phenomena, however conspicuous, before they have been observed by any one. We spent many hours at Cwm Idwal, examining the rocks with extreme care, as Sedgwick was anxious to find fossils in them, but neither of us saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomena all around us; we did not notice the plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders, the lateral and terminal moraines, yet these phenomena are so conspicuous that, as I declared in a paper published many years afterward, a house burnt down by fire could not tell its story more plainly than did this valley. If it had been filled with a glacier, the phenomena would have been less distinct than they now are.” At a later day when Darwin’s powers of observation had become acute in the highest degree, he noticed a bird’s feet covered with dirt. Rather a common fact, not worth dwelling on, earlier observers had supposed. Not so thought Darwin. He carefully washed the bird’s feet, and planting the removed solids he was rewarded with several strange plants brought from afar by his winged visitor.
A cousin to Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, is an investigator of eminence. In a study of visual memory, a faculty in which observation bears its best fruits, he says:—
“It is a mistake to suppose that sharp sight is accompanied by clear visual memory. I have not a few instances in which the independence of the two faculties is emphatically commented upon; and I have at least one clear case where great interest in outlines and accurate apprehension of straightness, squareness, and the like, is unaccompanied by the power of visualizing.”
A new instrument, machine or engine is imagined by its creator long before it takes actual form; everything he sees that will be of help he builds at once into his design, everything else, however interesting in itself, he passes with a heedless eye.