The person who would give to the world some great invention must not deceive himself into thinking that he can do it by creative processes. It is not our function to create. It is our province only to adapt the laws and forces already in existence to our needs. The process is really a relative rather than a creative one. The laws and forces are here. It is our work to relate ourselves to them. One cannot build a machine that will do anything. He can only construct a mechanism through which the already existing laws of nature can operate. Another mistake apt to be made by the amateur, and one which will lead him farther away from instead of nearer to success, is the entertainment of the notion that a wonderful mechanism must necessarily be complex. The wonderful thing about nature, after all, is its simplicity. The mechanism which is to establish a point of contact between us and a force of nature must be as simple in its principle as the force itself. The notable thing about almost any of our great inventions is the simplicity of their design and operative principle. After observing the action of any of them, one is quite apt to turn away and inwardly remark that he could have done the same thing himself if he had only thought of it. Of course, the chief approach to any notable achievement is the matter of thinking of it. Most of us do not think of these things, and the reason is often the fact that we are looking for something complex when the real principle is very simple. The problem of the would-be inventor or discoverer, then, is not one of adding something to the universe as it stands. His work is to ponder the forces that have long operated and the laws by which they have operated, and then relate his work to some one of them. One of the chief of these, and one upon which some of our notable inventions have been based, is the universal fact of vibration. The first great inventions which are based upon the vibration theory were made long before any of us were born, and each of us has been given a free sample of both. One is named the eye, while the other is known as the ear. So far as that is concerned, the work of the actual nerves at the surface of the skin is based upon the same principle. The other day in a medical laboratory I was examining a dissection of the human head made with a view to showing the nerves in their relation to the spinal trunk and to the brain. The brain had been removed down to where its base rests upon the spinal stem. I was not so much interested in the countless fibers running off from the entire length of the spinal cord nearly so much as the two sets of nerves which have to do with seeing and hearing. Off from the spinal stem, just below the base of the brain, two large nerves ran forward to the eyes, and two other large ones ran aside to the ears. These were the optic and the auditory nerves, respectively.