NOTES 295 



science classes in schools. He reviews briefly the discoveries and inventions 

 which have had the most important results in the recent war — explosives, internal 

 combustion engines, secondary batteries, wireless telegraphy, gyroscopes, sound- 

 ranging, chemical warfare, and even medical and surgical advances. It is 

 certainly not generally known that the Germans did not declare war until their 

 great factories for obtaining nitrates (for explosives) from the air were actually 

 at work, thus enabling them to dispense with imports of nitrates from Chili — nor 

 that the Allies were obliged to continue this expensive and dangerous importation 

 owing to their lack of similar foresight. The author says that as soon as the 

 German 70-mile range guns came into play, the whole details of them were at 

 once worked out by us, but that we were too magnanimous to use such weapons. 

 But we have been told that the Parisians suffered not at all inconsiderably from 

 the Big Berthas ; and if we had had similar guns we might have done much to 

 control this particular barbarity of the enemy by retaliation on their cities. There 

 is an unfortunate passage on the second and third pages of the book, in which it is 

 suggested that the war "owes its very possibility to science," and that, "but for 

 the stupendous advances that science has made in times within the memory of 

 many here present, no catastrophe at once so wide-spreading and so deep-reaching 

 could have happened." Many of the numerous enemies of science in this country 

 have been trying to saddle it with the war by pretending that the German attack 

 was due to their scientific attainments, jnst as their weapons were perfected by 

 these attainments ; but we doubt whether Lord Moulton desires to belong to 

 this camp. Probably scarcely one of the German war-makers knew any more of 

 science than our own politicians did — whose neglect of every common-sense 

 precaution gave the war-makers their great opportunity. The world is not 

 governed by men of science, but by various types of adventurers ; and it was the 

 latter among the Germans who used the former, just as a murderer may employ 

 the pharmacopoeia when it suits him to do so. To blame science for the war is 

 like blaming the pharmacopoeia for all the criminal poisonings which have 

 occurred by help of it. If man misuses his servant science, that is not the fault 

 of the latter. Nor do we even believe that the horrors of war have been aggra- 

 vated by the employment of scientific weapons ; for the old hand-to-hand fighting 

 must have been very terrible, and we read that almost the whole of a defeated 

 army was sometimes destroyed within a few hours. After all, the total casualties 

 in the recent war seem to have amounted to less than a third or a quarter of the 

 strength, and to much less than the annual toll to disease. 



From the commencement of the struggle it was obvious that victory was likely 

 to go to the more inventive side. The Germans had prepared everything in 

 advance, and our men of science were obliged to improvise at a moment's notice. 

 The more honour to them in the result ! General Ludendorff is reported to have 

 attributed his defeat to tanks and the blockade — that is, we hear, to the defeat 

 of the submarine largely by our sound-ranging devices. Probably the men to 

 whom victory, was chiefly due were these very men of science and inventors — 

 whose names are almost unknown to the public, who are given no part in our 

 numerous triumphal processions, and who, in many cases, have not even been paid 

 for their services ! Similarly, when a fine feat in aviation is performed, everyone 

 praises the gallant airman, but no one remembers the greater men who designed the 

 machine. Apparently, in the state of semi-civilisation in which we are really living, 

 the greater the work of an individual, the less does he receive in payment for it. 

 No, the war was not due to science, but to the fact that science has not yet ad- 

 vanced far enough to construct a rational mankind out of the present raw material. 



