Have you had time to follow their
work?'
Karenin shook his head. 'But I can imagine the scope of it,' he said.
'We have so many men working now,' said Fowler. 'I suppose at
present there must be at least a thousand thinking hard, observing,
experimenting, for one who did so in nineteen hundred.'
'Not counting those who keep the records?'
'Not counting those. Of course, the present indexing of research is
in itself a very big work, and it is only now that we are getting it
properly done. But already we are feeling the benefit of that. Since it
ceased to be a paid employment and became a devotion we have had only
those people who obeyed the call of an aptitude at work upon these
things. Here--I must show you it to-day, because it will interest
you--we have our copy of the encyclopaedic index--every week sheets are
taken out and replaced by fresh sheets with new results that are brought
to us by the aeroplanes of the Research Department. It is an index of
knowledge that grows continually, an index that becomes continually
truer. There was never anything like it before.'
'When I came into the education committee,' said Karenin, 'that index
of human knowledge seemed an impossible thing. Research had produced
a chaotic mountain of results, in a hundred languages and a thousand
different types of publication.
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