Abstract

INVENTION and discovery are so closely allied that they are often confused. In our common speech the two terms awfrequently used as synonymous, and if one seeks an exact line of dmarcation between them one finds it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish one from the other in any but the most general terms. Both involve an increase in knowledge which may be great or slight, and may have an immediate effect or may take a lifetime or more to consolidate. Both involve scientific imagination. Each may be only a happy idea, the inspiration of a moment or in some cases an accident, but the testing of the idea and its final enunciation as a physical truth or as a finished invention may occupy many years. Newton is reputed to have discovered the theory of gravitation on seeing an apple fall from a tree, but assuming that to have been the birth of the idea, we know that the completion of his discovery and the proof of the universal law of gravitation took the best part of his lifetimeand involved the invention of new branches of mathematics to complete the proofs.

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