Abstract
THE question as to how the vast mass of scientific work which is now annually produced can be most readily sifted and utilised is a matter of pressing importance. There are two opposite types of scientific men who fail in achieving all of which they are capable, because they respectively pay too much and too little regard to the work of their predecessors and contemporaries. The one class are pre-eminently students. Masters of the past history of their subject, they are familiar also with its latest developments, but in the effort to know what others have done, they not unfrequently exhaust energies which might have been better spent in adding to knowledge. To such men a well-ordered scheme for bringing the results of research into a small compass would be a most valuable boon. Of the other type are those who declare, “I never read; if I want to know a thing it is easier to find out all about it in the laboratory than in the library.” Whether this is so or not is largely a question of temperament, but there is no doubt that as matters now stand the task of repeating work which has already been done is often less distasteful and scarcely more wasteful of time and energy than the effort to discover if the question has been previously attacked, and if so, by whom and with what results.
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Order Or Chaos?. Nature 48, 241–242 (1893). https://doi.org/10.1038/048241a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/048241a0