velopment and maintenance of morale, the development of the less fit recruits, the acceleration of training and the reeducation of the wounded, the detection of promising candidates for special schools, finding human material for the best and quickest development of submarine listeners, of lookouts, and of gunpointers, all these were primarily psychological problems and the psychologists cooperated in their military solution. We had no military system developed to provide for these details. The enemy military authorities confidently regarded our lack of it as prohibiting effective participation in the war. The rapid development of a great fighting machine needed all our knowledge of human capacity and individual differences, and all our relevant laboratory techniques. Psychology took an honorable and not inconspicuous part in the democratic triumph of meeting a national crisis by the mobilization of the experience of non-military experts. To some of us it seems that we are again facing a national crisis in which the major symptoms are psychological. Again the enemy counts on our lack of organization. Our salvation depends on the re-mobilization of the expert experience of citizens. Relation of psychology to the National Research Council: JAMES R. ANGELL, A.M., Litt.D., chairman of the National Research Council, Washington (by invitation). The National Research Council is based upon forty or more scientific societies representing physics, astronomy, mathematics, engineering in all its branches, chemistry and chemical technology, geology and geography, medicine, biology and agriculture, anthropology and psychology. The council is organized to promote the interests of pure and applied science (both inside and outside the industries) in every practicable way throughout the United States. Its relation to psychology is precisely similar to its relation to the other sciences mentioned. In each instance, the supporting scientific societies elect representatives who compose the several divisions of the council, and these in turn, comprising as a rule about twenty men, selected for their eminence in their particular branch of work, come together and determine the special needs and opportunities for the improvement of research in their own fields. Special attention is paid to the possibilities of bringing about effective cooperation among research men and research agencies. Scientific investigation has hitherto been largely individualistic, and the most pressing need at the present moment is not so much the expansion of research agencies, although this is desirable, as the more effective employment of those already in existence. The Division of Psychology and Anthropology has formulated a number of cooperative projects, of which two may serve as illustrations. One of these has to do with the examination of the mental and physical characteristics of four important alien groups, i. e., Mexicans, Scandinavians, Sicilians and Japanese. Some two thousand of each group are to be scientifically examined by the best modern methods. The result of this study ought, as regards these special races, to give us far more accurate and useful knowledge than we now have of the problem which confronts us in our present attempt to assimilate these racial stocks into our native American people. The other project contemplates an expedition to Central Africa in the upper regions of the Congo for a study of the same scientific sort upon the aboriginal natives who are still to be found there largely untouched by the influences of civilization. The expedition will be sent out under a psychologist who commands the languages of the regions, and with the methods at present available, scientific results may be expected of a character hitherto wholly impossible. Psychological methods in business and industry: BEARDSLEY RUML, Ph.D., Philadelphia. (By invitation.) The individual in education: ARTHUR J. JONES, Ph.D., professor of education, University of Pennsylvania. (By invitation.) SCIENCE THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNLIKE1 SOME years ago, studying the agaves or century plants of the West Indies, I found that they represent not only many species but numerous rather distinct groups, and that the aggregates of individuals that we call species, and of species in these larger groups, resemble and differ from one another in a sort of proportion to the depth of water between the islands on which they are found, which was translated into differences somewhat proportionate to the length of time that their habitats have been separated by water barriers. a Those of near-by and apparently rather recently separated islands were not found to differ progressively and adaptatively in single character such as flower-shape or size of seed-vessels nor was there a correlated difference in these respects, but sometimes one and sometimes another such character was different, while no indication was evident that the plants were not living under essentially identical conditions so far as pollination and dissemination are concerned. When the idea of organic evolution was presented before the Linnean Society in 1858 in a convincing way, by Darwin and Wallace, the latter spoke of the process as a survival of the fittest, and the former, as the result of natural selection, in the struggle for existence which effects kinds or species as well as individuals of living things. The dissociation of parts of the ancestral stock of these West Indian agaves without any marked climatic difference in their homes appeared to me to have left each final island with a stock essentially in harmony with its environment and capable of deviating considerably in flower and fruit proportions from 1 Address of the president before the Illinois Chapter of the Society of the Sigma Xi, May 19, 1920. the parent type without derangement of this harmony. I was unable to see that either flower or fruit change within the observable limits rendered its possessor either better or less fitted to survive. Deviation from the type appeared to have followed some innate tendency and to have been possible in quite different directions within rather wide limits without rendering its possessor either more or less fit to survive. Within such limits, the changes of form seemed to have been free to wander at will along a number of differentiating paths. These plants apparently illustrate the survival of the equally fit, though unlike, rather than of the fittest whether alike or dissimilar, under the operation of Darwin's selective process which would weed out promptly those not really fit to meet the general conditions of life, while permitting secondary differences to appear and persist for a very long time. This is a rather self-evident presentation of one of the physiologist's exasperating troubles, the controlling existence of a harmonious optimum as he calls it, in conformity with which his cultures succeed best under conditions that sometimes differ annoyingly from those that he has reason to believe are the optima for the individual functions that he wishes to investigate experimentally one by one. It recalls forcibly, though not paralleling, the dominance of certain features in unskilfully made composite photographs. It parallels the transformation of that peculiar function, productive investigation, to the promotion of which the society of the Sigma Xi devotes its efforts. Conditions being collectively favorable, many differences that appear, whether fluctuating or mutant, represent variation rather than real evolution. Apt in aphorisms, Bailey once hit on the expression survival of the unlike for that outcome of natural selection or the survival of the fittest to which the name evolution usually is applied. It calls up the picture of a changing or changed environment which eliminates the harmoniously fit of the past and allows their successors of the present to fight it out among themselves for the final per petuation or disappearance of individual idiosyncrasies that they may have inherited or acquired. The organic change may or may not be abrupt because the change in environment may or may not have been sudden: very commonly it appears to have been gradual. Its product may or may not please us. Except through the artificial selection that we apply in the broad field of agriculture, we have not intentionally changed the controlling conditions. The great response of organic nature is not conformed to our wishes or ideals but to that innate law of living matter that compels it to perpetuate itself and the forms through which it may best do this. The product is as varied in effectiveness as in form, but it tends to efficiency in peopling the earth and in making use of by-products and waste as well as of the raw materials offered by inorganic nature. The lesson of organic evolution is at once discouraging and hopeful: discouraging as showing that the individual or the kind that can not keep to the gait must fall out of the procession; encouraging as showing that keeping the pace is not necessarily keeping in step; and hopeful in that as the world of dead matter changes, the world of living matter effectively shifts its life processes and vital machinery toward ultimate conformity to the great opportunity that is its own for the moment-a conformity which if perfect would eliminate finally disharmonies, and realize a perfect teleology of self-contained adaptation. Even inert matter is coming more and more to evolutionary recognition, as its heavier elements are found to be older and more complex, their unaided combinations to tend into an instable complexity that approaches the surpassingly labile living matter, and their dissociated particles to gather through unmeasured space into solar systems perhaps all at some time as capable of supporting life as our own is known to be at present. The greatest law of nature seems to be that of spontaneous aggregation of matter into complex forms and of the shaping of these into efficient forms. We are given now to naming our chosen activity-whether in science, literature, history or art-research, and the dictionaries permit each of us who cultivates it productively, to be spoken of as a researcher. I do not like the words: the second is not euphonious to my ear; and the first is too suggestive of the cyaniding of the tailings of an abandoned mine or of the sifting of what may be called variously a dust-bin or an ashpile. Unfortunately it is true that neither mining nor furnace management nor refuse collection is exhaustive, and re-search of their refuse must be made over and over again as values change or methods are improved. But I like to think of our profession as that of investigation and of our colleagues as investigators -trailing the truth wherever it must be sought through the débris left by our predecessors when necessary, but by preference in the virgin field of nature. This profession in its history parallels in many ways that of a phylum of plants or of animals. It has had its days of fruitless aimlessness; some of its products appear grotesque to us of to-day; some of its branchlets, like those of a cottonwood or an elm in autumn, have been cast off, perhaps to the benefit of the whole, when they did not continue to produce in proportion to their early promise or in comparison with others more favorably environed. Some, too favorably circumstanced, may even have been pruned out as unfruitful or destructive of a collectively effective balanced symmetry because of their rank vegetation. Natural and artificial selection have worked on it since its beginning, and there is little reason to suppose that they will not continue operative until its end. The parallel may be carried somewhat further than one would carry it at first thought. Long before man began to find the products of organic nature profitable indeed long be fore his appearance on the scene-plants had developed the power of making food and of applying it to their needs; and animals had acquired the habit of carrying its use into a much more dynamic field. The greatest tilth of this field is by man, the present culmina tion of the family tree of our living world; and what the struggle for existence among his more lowly relatives had produced, that he could use, he has selected and favored and modified to his greater benefit. The strife between purposeful intelligence and productive capability, in which within limits the former is fore-ordained to dominate the latter, is not peculiar to human civilization and to the dominance of man over man: it reaches far into his relations with his fellow-creatures of lesser endowment. He has shaped them to his needs or fancies, very often in opposition to the selective law of nature; he has multiplied, at the expense of others, those that he fancied, and thereby has increased the power of the earth to support human life and human activity far beyond its unaided capacity; he has become a potent factor in natural selection, and will continue operative as long as he does not kill the goose that lays the golden egg. It is significant that what he does not use, directly or indirectly, he commonly permits to exist through indolence or impotence rather than tolerance. He knows that what he calls vermin are troublesome if not injurious. He protects himself and what he considers his property against them more or less consistently and completely; but in proportion to their power to evolve helpfully in harmony with conditions of life in the chinks and crannies of the world into which he can not or does not follow them, they escape and thrive not only despite him but at his expense and literally on him. The rat is his uninvited guest the world over, and the gray rat, if he were worshipful and learned, would render daily thanks to the patron who has made him the rat of rats, transporting, housing and feeding him to an almost unbelievable extent. Rust, smut, mildew, and fermentative germ thrive under his régime; the world population of codling moth and chinch bug has enlarged a myriadfold through the ability of these selfseeking creatures to get forward as riders on man's own self-seeking progress. Perhaps in this survival and increase of parasites and other vermin lies the token that the earth and the fulness thereof are not to man; for if the Nature whose product he is permits his enemies to thrive and multiply notwithstanding his effort to protect himself, she gives in this permission a strong suggestion that his power is only an expression of her own power, and that while he sleeps and relaxes effort her activity continues unabated along the line of peopling the earth toward its full capacity with a million forms of creatures to each one of which she offers the same fundamental problem as his ownperpetuation of the individual and of its kind, or restriction and disappearance, according to its fitness and adaptability under the conditions of the moment. We owe the privilege of wearing the key of the Sigma Xi to the fact that at some time or other each one of us has been recognized by investigators as something of a zealot in their own field, giving promise or bearing the first fruits of his own investigation. In our turn, we welcome to companionship the brothers of a newer day. Most of us enter this fellowship from the novitiate of university life under guidance and supervision. The founders of the society, themselves, had achieved in college or professional school the qualifications that they prescribe for membership. Their forerunners in investigation through the centuries, for the most part had traveled the same route. Our organization is represented in laboratories rather than in the halls of classic learning. Those of us who have been connected with the society very long have no difficulty in calling to mind a number of men of our own or an earlier or a later generation, whose lot has not been cast in with the university or the college, but who in purposeful prying into science have shown the zeal that our society stimulates and who in productive and stimulating accomplishments may have surpassed us of seemingly greater opportunity. Those who initiated the inquiry into nature out of which such enormous knowledge and utility have poured into the lives of men within the last few generations, trained themselves or founded the schools in which others have been trained. Their zeal and industry and wis dom were the attributes of the highest human mentality: often, but unfortunately not always, infectious; exceptionally, and this happily, of such quality as to confer immunization on those who came into closest contact with them. Like other forms of human social development, the specialization of investigators offers many parallels to the specialization of organs and of organisms in nature. Its beginnings were very individualistic and sporadic. Its spread was limited by the natural barriers of sea and mountain, and the quite human obstacles of differing race and language. Investigation usually has meant not a road leading to a successful career-as the animal suc cess of man is measured, but a bypath more often leading to poverty and misunderstanding, and usually at best a way that could not be traveled safely very far from the beaten path of approved and utilized learning. My own university mentor, Farlow, like his great leader, Asa Gray, studied in the practical field of medicine so that he might be assured of the privilege of wandering-nobody could tell how far-into investigation apart from its immediate application in a necessary art. No doubt it is true that to some investigators the thought that no practical application could be made of their discoveries has lent added fascination to their work. No doubt to others an investigation undertaken with the purpose of securing the answer to an economic question still lacks in attractiveness. The greatest incentive to such work has been an innate thirst for knowledge for its own sake and a love of its pursuit. Even with the multiplication and broadening and deepening of universities that the last generation has witnessed, the privilege of adding to knowledge, of shaping something up by one's own effort, has resided very largely in the opportunity offered by a university chair for stealing a little time and a little effort from the first and paramount duty of the professor, teaching what is known already and training adaptable minds to meet life's needs. |