NOTES 487 



and care for nothing. Their beliefs and opinions are merely 

 those which have been taught to them by self-schemers and by 

 the idle stuff which they read in worthless papers. Not for 

 them the passionate desire for truth ; and too often their re- 

 ligions are but superstitions and their ideals base. And they 

 get for themselves rulers who are of the same kind : the here- 

 ditary impostors who pretend to possess the mandate of God — 

 who would really be, if he gave them such a mandate, a demon ; 

 and the political adventurers and the demagogues who rule 

 the world, not in the interests of the Great and the Good, but 

 of themselves ; and men in the mass look upon these quacks as 

 being heroes and prophets. Thus it happens that suddenly at 

 times the labours of those who have really made the wonderful 

 things which have raised men from the brute are dashed to 

 pieces, and men in the mass become the victims of themselves, 

 and destroy themselves ; just as the glutton dies from gluttony 

 and the drinker from drinking. They fall upon each other and 

 tear each other to pieces by millions ; regardless of Reason 

 they become the victims of Unreason ; regardless of Truth they 

 are massacred by Untruth ; worshipping fools they are led into 

 enormous slaughterings by the puerile ambition or stupidity of 

 their heroes. The sun is obscured and it seems as if the world 

 is tumbling to pieces. 



The Great Poet when he came near the end of his life saw 

 the truth of all this and constructed his last and most beautiful 

 allegory. He saw the exile of the gentle and wise Bringer of 

 Prosperity with his daughter the Wonderful ; and he saw also 

 the qualities of the mass, the average of the multitudinous 

 variations of nature ; the creature with the infinite crassitude 

 of the intellect of the mob — Caliban. 



R. R. 

 The Cash Value of Scientific Research 



Such is the striking title given by Prof. T. Brailsford Robert- 

 son to a pamphlet ' written in trenchant and arresting language. 

 He opens his paper by drawing an amusing, yet accurate, picture 

 of the state of mind of the non-scientific mortal. " The average 

 man in the street or man of affairs," he says, " has no very clear 

 conception of what manner of man a ' scientist ' may be. No 

 especial significance attaches in his mind to the term. No 



1 Reprinted from the Scientific Monthly, November 191 5. 



