< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu
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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
From him came the most notable of all the maxims which illustrate the disinterestedness of the chivalry of science. At the time he was absorbed in some minute investigations in a difficult department of zoology, he received a letter from the president of a lyceum at the West, offering him a large sum for a course of popular lectures on natural history. His answer was: "I can not afford to waste my time in making money." The words deserve to be printed in capitals; but Agassiz was innocently surprised that a sentiment very natural to him should have excited so much comment. He knew that scores of his brother scientists, American and European, would have used the words "afford" and "waste" in the same sense, had they been similarly interrupted in an investigation which promised to yield them a new fact or principle. Still the announcement from such an authority that there was a body of men in the United States who could not "afford to waste time" in making money had an immense effect. It convinced thousands of intelligent and opulent men of business, who had never before thought a moment of time devoted to the making of money could be wasted, that science meant something; and it made them liberal of their money when it was asked for scientific purposes. It did even more than this—it made them honor the men who were placed above the motives by which they themselves were ordinarily influenced.

Men of proved capacity who are willing to devote themselves to research will enter upon it with no selfish motives. They should be classed among the benefactors of mankind, engaged in a useful service. They should be encouraged by men of wealth, by state legislatures and by the establishment of endowments to provide the means of carrying on their researches. There are men of this kind in the State University of Iowa; to the citizens of the state I would say: "These men are a valuable asset to the state," and to the university authorities I would say: "Honor these men and encourage the pursuit of graduate studies under their direction." To any in the rising generation of students who have the internal leading to follow a career devoted to scientific investigation, if they are gifted and energetic, let them without hesitation enter upon this career. The compensations will be chiefly internal. Those who enter upon scientific investigation as a life work must forego certain material prizes in the world that await equally well-directed efforts in other lines of activity, but they will have other kinds of compensations—in living close to great truths, and realizing in their discoveries that thrill of the searcher when he has found, and after long years feeling the uplift of their occupation. Nevertheless, they must learn to renounce and not be embittered as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in that little gem of composition on the attributes of men.

To be honest, to be kind, to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier by his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation, above all, on the same grim condition to keep friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.

The Doctrine of Organic Evolution.—The crowning service of zoology in extending the boundaries of human understanding is found, perhaps, in the doctrine of evolution. The great sweep of this doctrine

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