Fantasy Football Challenge - Football Fanatics Library

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Popular Science Monthly

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not create geniuses, often we can not discern them, but having discerned, surely we can use them to the best advantage. It is true that all scientific research has depended and will depend upon individuals; Simon Newcomb expresses the matter thus: 'It is impressive to think how few men we should have to remove from the earth during the past three centuries to have stopped the advance of our civilization. In the seventeenth century there would only have been Galileo, Newton and a few other contemporaries, in the eighteenth they could almost have been counted on the fingers, and they have not crowded the nineteenth.'[7] [7] "Inventors at Work," Iles, Doubleday Page, 1906. The first thing we have to do is to discover such men, to learn to know them or suspect them when we meet them or their works. The next is to give them moral and financial recognition, and the means of doing their work. Our procedure in the past has been the reverse of this. I quote from a letter of Kepler to his friend Moestlen: 'I supplicate you, if there is a situation vacant at Tubingen, do what you can to obtain it for me, and let me know the prices of bread, wine and other necessaries of life, for my wife is not accustomed to live on beans.' The founder of comparative psychology, J. H. Fabre, that "incomparable observer" as Darwin characterized him, is now over ninety years of age, and until very recently was actually suffering from poverty. All his life his work was stunted and crippled by poverty, and countless researches which he was the one human being qualified by genius and experience to undertake, remain to this day unperformed because he never could command the meager necessary equipment of apparatus. Once again, what can we do? No small proportion of the population of a modern community are alumni of some institution of higher learning, and one thing that these can do is to see to it by every means in their power that some measure of the spirit of academic freedom is preserved in their alma mater. That the spirit of inquiry and research is not merely tolerated therein but fostered and substantially supported, morally and financially. As members of the body politic, we can assist the development of science in two ways. Firstly, by doing each our individual part towards ensuring that endowment for the university must provide not only for "teaching adolescents the rudiments of Greek and Latin" and erecting imposing buildings, but also for the furtherance of scientific research. The public readily appreciates a great educational mill for the manufacture of mediocre learning, and it always appreciates a showy building, but it is slow to realize that that which urgently and at all times needs endowment is experimental research. Secondly, it is vital that public sentiment should be educated to the point of providing the legal machinery whereby some proportion, no matter how small, of the wealth which science pours into the lap of the community, shall return automatically to the support and expansion of scientific research. The collection of a tax upon the profits accruing from inventions (which are all ultimately if indirectly results of scientific advances) and the devotion of the proceeds from this tax to the furtherance of research would not only be a policy of wisdom in the most material sense, but it would also be a policy of bare justice. THE PHYSICAL MICHELANGELO BY JAMES FREDERICK ROGERS, M.D. NEW HAVEN, CONN. You will say that I am old and mad, but I answer that there is no better way of keeping sane and free from anxiety than by being mad. HAD Michelangelo been less poetic and more explicit in his language, he might have said there is nothing so conducive to mental and physical wholeness as saturation of body and mind with work. The great artist was so prone to over-anxiety and met (whether needlessly or not) with so many rebuffs and disappointments, that only constant absorption in manual labor prevented spirit from fretting itself free from flesh. He toiled "furiously" in all his mighty undertakings and body and mind remained one and in superior harmony--in abundant health--for nearly four score and ten years. This Titan got his start in life in the rugged country three miles outside Florence: a place of quarries, where stone cutters and sculptors lived and worked. His mother's health was failing and it was to the wife of one of these artisans that her baby was given to nurse. Half in jest, half in earnest, Michelangelo said one day to Vasari: 'If I have anything good in me, that comes from my birth in the pure air of your country of Arezzo, and perhaps also from the feet that with the milk of my nurse, I sucked in the chisels and hammers wherewith I make my figures.' He began his serious study of art (and with it his course in "physical training") at fourteen, when he became apprenticed to a painter. He was not vigorous as a child, but his bodily powers unfolded and were intensified through their active expression of his imagination. His life was devoted with passion to art. He had from the start no time for frivolity. Art became his religion--and required of him the sacrifice of all that might keep him below his highest level of power for work. His father early warned him to have a care for his health, "for," said he, "in your profession, if once you were to fall ill you would be a ruined man." To one so intent on perfection and so keenly alive to imperfection such advice must have been nearly superfluous, for the artist could not but observe the effect upon his work of any depression of his bodily well-being. He was, besides, too thrifty in all respects to think of lapsing into bodily neglect or abuse. He was severely temperate, but not ascetic, save in those times when devotion to work caused him to sleep with his clothes on, that he might not lose time in seizing the chisel when he awoke. He ate to live and to labor, and was pleased with a present of "fifteen marzolino cheeses and fourteen pounds of sausage--the latter very welcome, as was also the cheese." Over a gift of choice wines he is not so enthusiastic and the bottles found their way mostly to the tables of his friends and patrons. When intent on some work he usually "confined his diet to a piece of bread which he ate in the middle of his labors."

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