An objection has been made that no one can tell how long it will be after a discovery is made before the nation will derive the chief benefit. The length of time which elapses between the publication of discoveries and their practical fruits is very variable. Usually benefit commences at once and gradually widens; directly discoveries are published they begin to be used by compilers of scientific books, and by teachers and lecturers in science, and are thus diffused { 198} amongst the public in general, and begin to produce beneficial effects. Inventors, manufacturers, medical men, and others, also begin to apply them to their respective purposes. In some cases striking applications are immediately made of them, and public attention is thus directed to the useful result; but in many cases the beneficial effects are small, numerous, and indirect, and it is difficult to trace and describe them. The objection also is deficient in force, because expenditure in any other occupation, and receipt of the profit upon it, are rarely simultaneous. Many of the wisest reforms in this country have been a long time in producing their results. We must therefore be content, as in all ordinary cases of investment, with the conviction that the expenditure will be profitable, and we must wait patiently for the certain harvest. In research, as in many other human enterprises, a man who will not move until he is absolutely certain that what he intends to do will at at once succeed, must sit still and perish.
Suggestions have also been made to appoint a Government Committee, or Council, whose function should be to value scientific discoveries, and make corresponding amounts of reward to the discoverers. But this appears to be a less feasible plan, because no man can, at the period of discovery, determine what amount of practical result a discovery will ultimately produce. Who could have foretold with certainty at the date of Oersted's discovery of electro-magnetism, that this discovery would result in { 199} the expenditure of hundreds of millions of pounds upon telegraphs alone?[35]
Objections have been made to definite payment for labour in research, on the ground of indefiniteness of the results, and the impossibility of measuring their value. Can we expect to buy new scientific knowledge at so much a pound, or to retail discovery by the pint? The work of discoverers is as definite as that of many other persons who are paid. Who can measure the value of the cure of souls, of the duties of a judge, or of those of a field-marshal? Instead of paying for the labour of research in a definite way, we have adopted unsatisfactory makeshifts. Exceptional gifts, and semi-charitable pensions, have been with difficulty obtained in a few cases for scientific men; most often for those who applied scientific knowledge to practical uses than for those who discovered that knowledge. In this country, neither lawyers, medical men, military persons, nor clergymen are paid definitely by results, but by time and labour, in accordance with the reputation of the man, and there is no sufficient reason why investigators should not be similarly remunerated. The differences in the cases are only ones of degree.