knows enough of other matters to see
his particular specialty in its relation to things in general. He must,
to this degree at least, be a philosopher. This very general conception
of scholarship is fairly constant, but the fields which the conception
includes are broadening day by day and almost hour by hour. We cannot
to-day limit scholarship to the polite branches which were all that it
embodied when this Society was founded or even when this Chapter was
established. The scholar of the old-fashioned type must now accept as
his fellow the man who has helped to flatten the trajectory of the
16-inch shell, or to control the birth rate of the cootie. Later on I
shall suggest one other element which, in the light of the test which
American scholarship has undergone in the past two years, it seems to me
should now be included in our idea of the typical American scholar.

We Americans are proud of being called a nation of inventors; and most
of us have made, or almost made, private discoveries of an inventional
nature which, for some reason, have never come to fruition. The
scientific boards in Washington during the war received more than sixty
thousand suggestions in some mechanical field; and I am told by those
who ought to know that of all these not more than five of those coming
from untrained minds were of any practical value. Even from the trained
minds there came, I am told, no fundamental discovery in science as a
direct result of the war conditions. Suggestions of improvements in
detail and valuable suggestions there were in plenty, new applications
of known principles, but application of a fundamentally new idea, no.
That is only to say what we already know, that discovery is not made to
order. In each case the idea had already been born in the mind of some
intellectual pioneer and worked out by him, and some man who had the
idea in the front of his mind was at hand to apply it to the new
condition. And that means, I think, that if we met the test, we met it
with our scholars.

When the test came, certain fields of scholarship naturally afforded a
better chance for immediate service than others. The chemist, for
example, had a better chance a thousand-fold than the archaeologist. It
is extraordinary, however, how many of the gifts which burned bright on
the national altar came from men with some out-of-the-way specialty.
Take archaeology itself, if you will. The best trench helmet developed
during the war was des