Much is Still to be Discovered.
“To many,” says Sir Michael Foster, Professor of Physiology at Cambridge, “scientific knowledge seems to be advancing by leaps and bounds; every day brings its fresh discovery, opening up strange views, turning old ideas upside down. Yet every thoughtful man of science who has looked round on what others beside himself are doing will tell you that nothing weighs more heavily on his mind than this: the multitude of questions crying aloud to be answered, the fewness of those who have at once the ability, the means, and the opportunity of attempting to find the answers. Among the many wants of a needy age, few, if any, seem to him more pressing than that of the adequate encouragement and support of scientific research.” With his own field of science in view he continues: “We want to know more about the causation and spread of disease and about the circumstances affecting health before we can legislate with certainty of success. At home we want to know more about the spread of tubercle, of typhoid fever, and other infectious diseases; we want to know more about the proper means to secure that the water we drink, the food we eat, and the air we breathe, should not be channels of disease; we want to know more about the invisible elfic micro-organisms which swarm around us, to learn which are our friends, and which our foes, how to nourish the one, how to defeat the other; we want to know the best way to shield man in the factory and the workshop against the works of man.”
As to the fewness of those who have the highest capacity for original research, who have it in them to add to known truth in a notable way, Professor Simon Newcomb of Washington, the acknowledged dean of science in America, has said:—“It is impressive to think how few men we should have to remove from the earth during the past three centuries to have stopped the advance of our civilization. In the seventeenth century there would only have been Galileo, Newton and a few other contemporaries; in the eighteenth, they could almost have been counted on the fingers; and they have not crowded the nineteenth. Even to-day, almost every great institution for scientific research owes its being to some one man, who, as its founder or regenerator, breathed into it the breath of life. If we think of the human personality as comprehending not merely mind and body, but all that the brain has set in motion, then may the Greenwich Observatory of to-day be called Airy; that of Pulkowa, Struve; the German Reichsanstalt, Helmholtz; the Smithsonian Institution, Henry; the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoölogy, Agassiz; the Harvard Observatory, Pickering.”