It should be emphasized at this point, that there is a fundamental difference between investigations or tests which contemplate an immediate modification of practice and those investigations in which research--that is, the discovery of new truths--is the sole object. Tests which are carried on within the business must never lose sight of the fact that a business is a going concern and that it is impracticable and usually undesirable to transform a business into a research laboratory. Scientific methods in business should not be confused with the larger problem of scientific business research. This larger task, if undertaken by the individual business concern, is the work of a separate department. For business generally, it will have to be conducted either by the Government, or by business-research endowments. The point at which, in practical business, research should give place to action is a question that wise counsel and the sound sense of the trained executive must determine. An example of the contrast between a scientific and a rule-of-thumb approach, as applied to a question of major policy, is found in discussions of the relative advantages of a catalogue and mail-order policy over against a policy of distribution by traveling salesmen. A few years ago the head of one of the largest wholesale organizations in the United States, talking with an intimate friend, expressed fear that his house, which employed salesmen, might be at a dangerous disadvantage with its chief competitor, which did an exclusively mail-order business. The friend comforted him with the assurance that there are many buyers who prefer to be visited by salesmen and to have goods displayed before them. This fact, he held, would always give an adequate basis for the prosperity of a house that employed the salesman method of distribution. Neither the fear nor the assurance here expressed reveals a scientific attitude of mind. Careful analysis shows, on the one hand, that the mail-order policy is not the most effective means of cultivating intensively a well populated territory. On the other hand, it shows that the expense of sending salesmen to distant points in sparsely populated areas more than absorbs the profits from their sales. Individual concerns have arrived at these conclusions by experiment and accurate cost-keeping and have succeeded in reaching a scientific decision as to which territories should be cultivated by salesmen and which ones should be covered exclusively through advertising and the distribution of catalogues and other literature.