METHODS OF SECURING BETTER COOPERATION BETWEEN GOVERNMENT AND LABORATORY ZOOLOGISTS IN THE SOLUTION OF PROBLEMS OF GENERAL OR

NATIONAL IMPORTANCE1

LET us admit at once that government bureaus have great difficulty in getting men trained for their work. Let us go further, and admit that government bureaus have practically, except for certain fundamentals, to train their own men. Let us acknowledge also that the men in charge of the biological laboratories of the universities of the country are ready and anxious to train their men to be of the greatest possible service to the country, and that this readiness and this anxiety have been intensified by the great crisis through which we have been and are still passing.

How is this to be brought about? Plainly by a very perfect understanding and sympathy between the men in charge of the government bureaus and the men in charge of the university laboratories.

Although this suggestion has been made a number of times (I made it myself twenty years ago in an address before the American

1 A symposium before the American Society of Zoologists, held at Baltimore on December 26, 1918, Professor C. E. McClung presiding, included papers and discussions as follows: Representing the Bureau of Entomology, Dr. L. O. Howard. Discussion by J. G. Needham, representing the Bureau of Fisheries, Dr. Hugh M. Smith. Discussion of Dr. H. B. Ward. Representing the Bureau of Animal Industry, Dr. B. H. Ransom. Discussion by Dr. Herbert Osborn. Representing the Bureau of Biological Survey, Dr. E. W. Nelson. Discussion by Dr. R. K. Nabours. Relation of the Council of National Defense and the National Research Council to the Advancement of Research, Dr. John C. Merriam.

Society of Naturalists at Baltimore), this present discussion is, I hope, an emphatic and practical beginning of a definite movement which will bring results. It is primarily, perhaps, for the government men to point out the needs. They are now assured of the warm desire to cooperate on the part of the university men, and it is only by the closest cooperation that the best results can be secured. This involves more than mere suggestions from the government to the universities. It should mean a thorough knowledge on the part of the heads of the university laboratories of the intimate nature of the problems being studied and of the methods which are being adopted to solve these problems. Such a knowledge as this can best be gained by personal contact with the workers, and such contact should be of such a nature as to bring about not only suggestions to the teachers as to the best methods of training their men for future government work but also suggestions from the trained minds of the teachers as to other directions or means of attacking the problems which the government is trying to solve.

It would be an ideal arrangement if every highly trained laboratory man in the principal universities could be made a collaborator of some government scientific bureau and could be permitted and encouraged at government expense to visit for a longer or shorter time the different field laboratories of the government working in lines in which he himself is working, and thus bring about the personal knowledge and personal contact necessary for both lines of suggestion. Such an arrangement in a large way is probably impractical at present, but it might be started in a small way and in individual cases and will probably become eventually a fixed and valuable policy.

And now as to teaching and the training of workers, I don't know whether as a rule teachers have kept positive and relative values clearly in their own minds and in the minds of their students. Do they point out plainly the practical utilizations of zoology? Do they show their students the whole of the field

that is open to the trained investigator, and do they make their teaching as broadly attractive as possible? Have they made enough use of the great out-of-doors? Are they utilizing to the full the educational help of the motion picture?

In general, a man coming from a university to that branch of the government service with which I am connected should be fundamentally sound in botany, chemistry and physiology, and he should have an acquaintance with the principal foreign languages in which the results of important work are published.

There is need, as my colleagues who are to speak for other government bureaus will readily admit, for several different types of men in the service-men who have been trained for different kinds of work-and this should be borne in mind in considering the following suggestions.

We need more training in taxonomy, that basic branch of zoology upon which all other work rests.

We need an infinite amount of investigation in the different tropisms, in behavior, in all ecological lines, and, considering relative values, forms should be chosen for such studies from among those species which have an important economic rank or from among very closely related forms. In many cases enormous time has been comparatively wasted from the want of recognition of the importance of this point.

There should be careful training in the planning of experiments, in the interpretation of results, in the collation of suggestive results, and in the preparation of reports. The average man coming from a university is wofully lacking in the latter training, and gains it with slow progress after entering the government service.

As to cooperative work between the uni versities and the government laboratories, in addition to the training of men by the former for service in the latter, there is much that can be done aside from this training and the possible official collaboration of certain teachers with traveling privileges hinted at in a former paragraph.