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which they have been specifically organized, but also in a broader way as affecting state and national issues. At the best, however, these individual organizations are concerned, for the most part, with service to the individual, and while not confined to such, these societies have been able to work in a broad way for the public welfare only through combined organization of some kind. All thinking engineers are aware of the inefficient manner in which much of the engineering and industrial features of our government, city, state and national, are conducted, and the experience of our local engineering societies in working for a better and more economical policy in the conduct of these affairs in cities, as well as the success that has attended such organizations, as the Engineering Council, in trying to assist on questions of broader scope all lead to the belief that a Federated Engineering Society, which can speak for all engineers in the important affairs concerning which we are justified in speaking, must be productive of beneficial results. It is almost axiomatic that in a nation such as ours where industry is the great factor of our existence these statements must be true. Industry is the life of our nation, and engineering is the backbone of industry. Surely if any class of men have a right, or better still, a duty, to band themselves together for the betterment of the fundamental industrial principles of our nation, engineers, using the term in a broad sense, have full justification for so doing. These are matters of common knowledge to all engineers and scarcely need to be defended or explained.

There is, however, a much greater and deeper reason in my opinion why we have need for a society of this kind. We are all prone to think that the problems of our day and date are peculiar and unlike any that have gone before. As a matter of fact, history teaches us just the contrary and a superficial examination of any of the great civilizations that have preceeded us will show that basicly they differ very little from the one that we now enjoy. The great fundamental principle of all civilizations is division of labor;

at once the most effective tool that man has ever devised, it is at the same time the cause of his greatest difficulties. Because, wherever division of labor is employed, coordinated effort necessarily follows. We know of no civilizations built up by a single individual, though Robinson Crusoe is reported to have made a very good effort. Nor do we know of civilizations that were built up by a limited number of persons. Basicly, civilization is possible only where there is a wide use of division of labor accompanied by coordinated effort. But with coordinated effort comes always the difficult problem of awarding fairly and justly the fruits of labor, and from the beginning of time men have wrestled unsuccessfully with the problem of "what is mine and what is thine." As far back as we can read history we find industrial codes aimed at the solution of this difficult problem. The Mosaic code, based on a much more ancient Egyptian code, the remarkable code of Hamurabi and a still more ancient code recently discovered, all bear witness that this problem is very ancient indeed and has always been the one great problem incident to the use of division of labor and the building up of a civilization. The solutions offered by these ancient codes are for the most part of a legal character, often very arbitrary and intended more as a means of keeping the peace rather than as a solution of the problem on the ground of merit and justice. And to a large extent we have inherited these viewpoints in our modern industrial codes.

Wherein does modern industry differ from these ancient civilizations? The advent of the modern machine era and the extension of the use of scientific methods have carried division of labor to a degree undreamed of by our ancestors a few hundred years ago. the ancient civilizations were complex ours is infinitely more so and the difficulty of defining "what is mine and what is thine" has increased many fold.

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And the solutions we have been offered for this problem are many and curious. The advocates of single tax, prohibition and women's rights, of various kinds of tariff,

of various schemes of taxation are all quite sure that if their measures are enacted the millennium would be here. If the ancient civilizations were complex ours is chaotic, and further extension of our complex industrial system makes this personal problem more and more difficult.

Out of this chaotic condition, however, three viewpoints to-day stand out above all others and are well worthy of carful consideration. The first is the conviction that is rapidly taking root in the minds of thinking men that industry should be considered a means of supporting the human race, and not as a means of personal corporate or state profit: the conviction furthermore that all men are entitled to a certain amount of physical, mental and spiritual well-being, and that the nation which can develop such well-being is the one that will endure.

rest.

The second is a conviction that no adjustment of these difficult industrial matters can be enduring that is not based upon justice. It is true that justice varies with time and place, but whatever stands for justice at the time and place considered, is the only basis on which enduring industrial adjustment can This conviction differs from the old legal viewpoint quite markedly, and it is well illustrated in our changed point of view concerning accident compensation. For hundreds of years accident compensation was based on legal verdicts inherited by us from old English common law and having sometimes little to do with justice. The modern compensation law is an effort to adjust these matters on the ground of justice and the fair deal.

The third conviction is that there can be no justice where there is no knowledge. Any one who has read carefully the history of industrial disputes during the last few years can not fail to be impressed with the truth of this statement. Wherever a wide knowledge of fact can be obtained, adjustments usually are not difficult, but an enduring adjustment can never be accomplished where facts are not known.

What has this to do with the work of the engineer? A very great deal indeed. A few

years ago the engineer was looked upon as one who built and designed machines or structures. With the growth of his technical and scientific background it has become necessary for him to assume the management of industry and to-day he stands as the foremost figure in industrial management. This has brought him for the first time in close touch with the human element of industry and face to face with the great problem of the distribution of wealth. Up till recent times he was not expected to know of these matters and much less was he expected to have any wise ideas as to the solution of the problem. It should be remembered, however, that the engineer in thus enlarging his field has brought with him the most powerful mental tool that the human has devised, and which we call commonly the "scientific method." With this method he has conquered and subdued nature. At the present time he is teaching the human race a better and more efficient means of organizing industry. It remains to be seen whether he can apply this method to the solution of the old time problem of "what is mine and what is thine." It should be remembered that this problem has been wrestled with by many able minds but it will also be remembered that many of those who have given much time and thought to these problems did not have the intimate knowledge of industry, and of those who work in industry that is the possession of the engineer to-day. If he undertakes the solution of this problem with the same energy and vision that he has applied to fields that he has already conquered, I am hopeful for the result.

I see, therefore, in the Federated Engineering Societies something more than an organization to assist city, state and nation in the solution of technical problems. I see in it an opportunity for the engineer to study and to solve the last remaining problem of civilization. I see in the society a means of gathering data on the industrial problem such as we have not possessed and in general of obtaining that knowledge, which as I have

already indicated, is absolutely essential to this great problem.

And I am not without hope that the engineer will qualify for this work. There are many indications that their ideas are stirring in the minds of forward-looking men. At the last election Mr. James Hartness, well known as an engineer and inventor, was elected to the Gubernatorial chair of the State of Vermont, an honor, so far as I know, that has never before been conferred upon an engineer. And it was with the greatest satisfaction and pleasure that engineers, not only in this country, but elsewhere, viewed the selection of Mr. Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce. These are pioneer workers in a field hitherto controlled by the lawyer and the politician, and their progress will be watched with the keenest interest and sympathy by all engineers. Of the success of their mission no engineer has the slightest doubt, for we are well aware that these men will bring to the problems of state the methods that have enabled the engineer to subdue nature and build up civilization.

Can there be any question that back of a movement as great as this we need an allembracing Society of Engineers; a society whose business it will be to foster the solution of the great problems of industry which are the problems of the engineer. The functions of such a society will differentiate sharply from those of an individual society in that as before stated, the individual society is more likely to deal with service to the individual. This society is organized for service to the nation. It is a challenge to national service. There is no question in my mind that it has a bright future and is worthy of the support of engineers of all kinds and in all places.

PLAGIARISMS

THERE have been published in recent numbers of SCIENCE1 communications from correspondents more or less involving the interest

1 SCIENCE, January 14, 1921; February 11, 1921; March 4, 1921.

which revolves around what we are apt to call plagiarism. They are concerned for the most part with matters of not very serious import in scientific circles and the communications are marked by courtesy and good humor. These amiable features are sometimes absent in the more earnest and specialized realms of research and the whole subject is only too often conducive to unfortunate and wearying controversy and to permanent and deplorable enmities between the best of men and those least likely, one would think, knowingly to rob a fellowman of credit for original work. One not himself drawn into the heat of such conflicts is often led to believe that a more thorough understanding of some of the implications and correlations, a more just appreciation of the numerous underlying springs which move the human mind would modify it. A more constant keeping in view the history of science, a realization of how numerous are the expositions of facts. before the world becomes attentive even to the most obvious of them, would cause these deplorable incidents to become less frequent. The character of the recent outbreak in SCIENCE was mild and it was devoid of bitterness, as most incidents are which present such examples of the humor and worldly common sense of the participants, as these communications do. The chances of unfortunate consequences being remote it is perhaps an opportune time to say something of the broader aspects of the subject of plagiarism.

Its wide affiliations are best appreciated in an analysis of the underlying principles to which I have referred. Many will be disposed to criticize what may seem the too wide significance I give to the term. Many look upon it only as one of evil import. However, it is easier to expand its usual limitations a little than to find or invent a name which after all would only here and there overlap the commonly accepted outlines of the usual term.

Its most sinister acceptation interests us but little. When a man affixes his name to a long essay or a book which another man has written it would perhaps be better to call it thievery. I remember one such instance

occurring many years ago. I only introduce reference to it here because I am reminded that in defense of the quite undeniable fact there was advanced an explanation which sometimes, in less flagrant cases, has to be seriously considered. The culprit when convicted pleaded that he had imbibed the author's ideas from lectures he had heard him deliver and essays of his he had read, so that when he came to write these unconsciously flowed from his pen. This too is one of the implications of plagiarism, but alas! in this particular instance it was a question not of ideas—these were in no way notable— but of two or three thousand words repeated in the same sequence, certainly a monstrous accomplishment for the subconscious. With this aspect of plagiarism I am not here concerned, as I am not writing on the underlying causes of crime.

Where indeed shall we draw the line between a peccadillo and crime? At a not very remote period in the past there was no patent law, no copyright, far less any code punishing purloining even of words to say nothing of ideas. There seems only comparatively recently to have arisen a public opinion condemning such transgressions. They were once scarcely censurable. In the time of the Renaissance there was an entirely different point of view. Their equivalent for research was then the digging up of buried treasure out of ancient literature. This was so universal that it seemed a sort of affectation to be bringing in allusions to the derivation even of transliterations from ancient authors, forcing on the reader, as it were, the recognition that the writer was accurately and intimately acquainted with ancient models. It was taken for granted of any idea or incident that some Aristotle or Plato or Pliny had originated or transmitted it. Why bore the reader by continually reminding him of it? Indeed such impatience occasionally becomes vocal in the modern reader from this annoyance. Among the ancient authors Pliny was the only one who grouped his references in separate bibliographical categories. He alone, so far as I know, in his "Natural History"

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went about the matter in a way that approaches our systematic bibliographies, and he took good care to save the reader from the weariness of continual textual indications of the sources of his astounding statements. Any story, however good, any lesson, however valuable, any humor, however infectious it otherwise would be, is apt to evaporate under less careful supervision. The literature of the subject is what the rushed researcher today first skips, the details next and the conclusions," least of all. The form of a modern research article at best is a grisly horror. I do not know if the man has been born yet who can avoid bibliography, details and conclusions, and yet have his essay stand forth in shining attractiveness in its exposition of original work in science. One sometimes wishes to be born again when that blessed time is a reality. It is therefore hardly fair to group the conventional essay of modern science with real literature. The real masters of science sometimes approach it; they very rarely indeed attain it.

But in order to pursue our inquiry into the nature of plagiarisms, it is in general literature for the most part we must seek our illustrations. When Molière wrote his comedy "Le Médecin Malgré Lui," he put in the mouth of his own characters the discourse, found in Rabelais, of Panurge, as to the man who had married a mute wife. It is not worth while to pursue the joke further backward, as we shall find other illustrations easily enough, but those who saw Joe Jefferson play "Rip van Winkle in Boucicault's adaptation of Irving's tale will remember the soliloquy of Rip on the mountain as to the vision of a happy married life, excited by the contemplation of the mute dwarfs he met there. Petrarch furnished Molière with other scenes, not the ideas alone but a considerable stretch of word for word translation. I have traced this back, not quite so literally perhaps, to Pliny and evidently through him to Pindar. The ancient Greek legends represent the complaint of Zeus finding practical executive attention in the smiting of Æsculapius for transgressing the permissible limi

tations of his art when he resurrected the dead. Later the complaint of Pliny and Petrarch also was that the doctors took unethical liberties with their opportunities. Pindar, Pliny, Petrarch, Molière, even Dr. Rabelais himself by inference, lash the doctors with the bitterest invectives for transgressions, some of which we admit to-day are daily committed against the ethics of the profession. It becomes stereotyped in Pliny, Petrarch and Molière.

Whether well done or badly done it is always paid alike. . . . A shoemaker in making a pair of shoes can't spoil a piece of leather without paying for it, but at this business when we spoil a man it does not cost us a cent.

Even Socrates has the same jibe put in his mouth by Plato, and to this Petrarch manages to allude, but to our unwritten modern ethical standards it is all flagrant plagiarism. As to medicine much of this continual abuse of it in ancient and modern satire is due to the underlying vice in its social regulation. It is the sole one of human activities wherein its practitioners are admonished, nay forced so far as possible, to work directly against their own material interests. No punishment is too severe, if we could only get at him, for the criminal who tries to further his commercial interests by the unnecessary worry and botheration to a patient, whom nature is better able to treat than the doctor. Is there any doubt of the occasional justification for such complaint? What is there against the other impostors of commerce? For them such conduct is ethical business. As for medical men attempting to stimulate their business by setting plagues agoing, that is unthinkable. Indeed the evolution of public health preservation is making daily more clear the anomaly of this age-long status of practitioners of medicine, and daily one sees more or less abortive attempts in the direction of change. Now the underlying cause of all this plagiarism in the satires and jibes against the doctors is the broad one of maladjustment of a certain social agency. It is the continued protest of society, falling into fairly narrow channels of expression it is true, but

it is also true that no one censures Molière or Petrarch, or ever did censure them for using ancient jokes and jibes as their own.2

Now the thread that runs through the stories of the effect wrought on the layman's mind by comparing the ideas aroused by viewing for the first time other worlds than ours through the telescope is that which the preacher seizes to emphasize the glory of God and the insignificance of man, whom he has created. That has been dinged into the consciousness of countless generations of men, ever more insistently, as modern science has made it more and more manifest. The suggestion of a parity becomes daily more grotesque. This grotesqueness finds frequent issue in words and it is not difficult to imagine that even the words are closely similar, when the humor of the thought strikes the same spot in the observer's mental machine.

Let me take a more concrete example. Does any one suppose that when Mark Twain wrote the extremely amusing dialogue in Tom Sawyer Abroad between Nigger Jim and the hero he was plagiarising Pliny? The former had a poor opinion of painters. One of them was paintin' dat old brindle cow wid de near horn gone you knows de one I means.

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He say when he git her painted de pictur's worth a hundred dollars. Mars Tom, he could a got de cow for fifteen." So Pliny's barbarian Gaul with the long hair, when at Rome was asked on his glancing at a masterpiece of an old slave leaning on his staff what he would give for it in cash. "I would not give a farthing even for the slave " was his contemptuous reply. It is apparent that such a joke is always lying close to the surface through all the ages since man made his drawings on the walls of the dark caves at Altamira and that is the way with the joke about the stars.

Lawyers are always writing to the astronomers for knowledge of when the moon might 2"Ancient jibes at the doctors," New York Medical Record, September 12, 1903.

3 Pliny, "Historia Naturalis," Liber XXXV., 8 Ed., Silling, Vol. V., p. 211.

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