THE ORGANIZATION OF RESEARCH
Experimental methods, guided by mechanics, optics, heat, electricity, and chemistry, were now systematically applied to physiology, then to psychology, and, with the help of the cellular hypothesis and the sciences of embryology, evolution, heredity, immunity, etc., they have transformed biology.
Everywhere, if other mathematical methods fail, the statistical method is being applied and in suitable cases, as, for example, life insurance, with great success; thus literally bringing order out of chaos.
Meantime the world has learned that science pays. Accordingly professorships have multiplied, societies have become more numerous, journals are endowed, institutes of research established, the Nobel prizes founded, and a livelihood is provided for large number of workers.
The number of working scientists, if not their quality, has enormously increased. An army has been organized and disciplined, and an amount of work which can scarcely be imagined has been produced. Scientific literature has now become a flood that has to be canalized with the help of special journals of various descriptions devoted solely to its review, description, and orderly classification, in order that it may be utilized at all.
The forward march of science has now become inevitable, like that of civilization itself. This vast army of workers are engaged, with no stake in the outcome, with no concern for the influence of their work upon church or state or any other human institution or interest, according to known and tried and proved rules, by description, measurement, experiment, and mathematical analysis, in multiplying our reliable, positive knowledge of the world around us. Year by year this knowledge grows, by leaps and bounds when commanded by genius, slowly and painfully at the hands of most men, but steadily and surely always.