Dr. Appleton's elaborate proposals for the Endowment of Research, made
in last week's issue of this journal, deserve the careful attention of scientific men. Our own difficulty in criti- cising them for tne present is this,—that we are hardly familiar enough with the nature of scientific research to feel at all sure of the feasibility of his plan. Dr. Appleton treats the question as if a student, setting himself to a particular branch of research, must be able to produce results within a given time, which would prove either his competence or his incompetence for the task. We confess that, so far as our imperfect knowledge of the sub. jest goes, this assumption does not seem to us to be true. Let Dr. Appleton read Professor Stanley Jevons's remarkable book, recently reviewed in these columns, on Scientific Method, and note in how many cases even the most original of scientific investigators struck at first into a totally wrong path of investiga- tion. Such men would, we suppose, under Dr. Appleton's plan, have been declared quite unfit for their proposed calling, although they would really have been competent to become the greatest ornaments of it. Our difficulty is at thc very threshold. Is competence for scientific investigation, in other words, the power of suggesting and verifying helpful hypotheses, a quality of which you can get any fair gauge in relation to young and untried men?
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