WORK OF RESEARCH

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 3, Issue 670, 24 October 1933, Page 3

WORK OF RESEARCH

LEVERHULME FOUNDATION TO ASSIST AMATEUR SCIENTISTS. EASING THE CHAINS. A great deal of nationally important research work is work of a kind that private enterprise will not pay for; therefore it must go undone, or must be earried out by a competent researcher who is financially able to give his time (he is a very rare hird), or must be earried out by a competent researcher with the financial help of a Foundation or a Government. Already Governments and Foundations (or similar form of research institution) have contributed m-oney to help the younger people to become researchers; but the Fellowships of the new Leverhulme Foundation fill the exce-llent purpose of finding money to help the proved researcher in a proved or partly proved line of ' research. He is often a man whose depondence on some paid job, or in strait financial circumstances, preprevents him from following his research to its logical conclusion. He it is — or rather his work — -who will benefit by the Leverhulme Foundation. The Fellowships are for "people who have done research, but whose time for its continuance. is curtailed by work of an administrative or other routine character." English papers announce that thero were 400 applicants for the first Fellowships. Seventeen of these suceed'ed. Almong the seventeen is "a Scots geneticist" who "proposes t0 spend a year on the Isle of Mull getting to know the Scottish red deer there individually." Is it not rather a pity that he could not he diverted to the ' Tararuas or to some still more deerinfested part of New Zealand? The biological appr-oach to wild-life questions in New Zealand inyolves a numher of researches that cannot he earried out by leisured incompetents of by unleisured competents. Volun- ' tary co-operation of skilled and unskilled men over a wide field • (the fresh water fish research is a case in point) is not to be despised, but as a rule a special job needs its own spe- ' cialist, whose time is seldom free. "The Listenex," from which the above quotations are taken, supplies other details of the new seventeen Fellows. One "is going out to ths ' Great Rift Valley in East Africa to do gravity and magnetic measurements" — (an enterprise as challenging as the measurement of "varves" in an old Rakaia lake-bed, the subject of a mission to New Zealand Jby a geolo-gist from Sweden. Another "proposes to do anthropological and ingu'istic reisearch ifi one 'of -the regions of the Karakoram and Hindu Kush." (How worthily might such a Foundation have aided the late MT. Elsdon Best in his parallel work in New Zealand). And "a graduate of Glasgow will work on Arabian music, while one of our best Shakespearean scholars will leave academic work to work full time on Shakespeare's text." The fact that the Leverhulme benefaction reaches these purposes may | serve as some xeminder that the tale of Maori music and legend is only , half told, the sarne is true of early | New Zealand history. Unsubsidised , researchers have worked faithfully, 1 and in the case of at least one of them material is all ready for publication, hut who will find the cost thereof ? } A great deal is-heard in the economic sphere ahout less work and more | leisure. But the most important leisure (and the rar-est) is -that which is applied to aehieving national purposes, as-in research. Hence the value of the Leverhulme Foundation idea.. It seems to be an idea worthy of wide' extensi-on.