| |
| |
Caption: Booklet - Addresses from Inauguration of Noyes
This is a reduced-resolution page image for fast online browsing.
EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:
80 half a day and attending to Innumerable petty administrative details, that 1 st power is gone for the days, and ach year is made up of just such days or worse in most of O T American nni\ rsities; the U mental alertness, the critical and creative faculties, are wasted on routine work, winch to a large extent could be done as well or better by a different type of man. Now, in Germany, as I knew it, the great investigators lectured at most once a day, their laboratory instruction was limited to research students, the instruction of all the other students in the laboratory being left wholly in the hands of other men, able men of rank and training, not inexperienced assistants. Then, only a little over half the year was given to academic work, almost half the year being left, not for recreation—a few weeks sufficed for that—but for that intense, absolutely undisturbed work required for the creating mind. A second important factor in the productiveness of our American chemists as compared with those abroad is found in the problem of research assistants; the creative imagination of the investigator in chemistry must always be held in check, as Richards has said, by experimental realiza% tion of the logical outcome of his flights o\ fancy; but chemical experimentation is one of groat minuteness, infinite attention to details and endless preparation, Where the German investigator can have, when he needs them, several assistants, ranking from a newly fledged doctor of philos ph: to an associate professor when n. j. a single research assistant in ohemistrj ha until recent yearn been a rare si iinen in
| |
