66o SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Leverhulme discussed the question of the future of Capital and Labour after the 

 war. The arrears in shipbuilding and housebuilding and the depletion of our 

 stocks of goods, both for home use and export, will create an enormous demand 

 for labour and machinery, so that the men who are returning from the war will all 

 be required in their former places in our industries, and as many of the women also 

 as can be spared from their home duties. The engineering works will be engaged 

 on our requirements for ships and railways, and it will not therefore be possible 

 at once to replenish the machinery required in other industries. In order to cope 

 with the demand existing machinery will need to be worked for a longer number 

 of hours. This can best be done and the biggest output best secured by reducing 

 the eight-hour day to a six-hour day for workers and working from two to four 

 shifts every twenty-four hours for machinery. It is estimated that capital invested 

 in machinery is accountable for more than 90 per cent, of the cost of production 

 apart from the cost of raw materials. By working the machinery longer and 

 increasing the output this proportion will be reduced and, provided increased 

 production follows from fewer hours, there should be a margin left over where- 

 with the workman can be paid actually higher wages for the six-hour day than 

 he now receives for the eight-hour day. The leisure so obtained could be made 

 beneficial in many ways, in particular education of an appropriate kind should be 

 compulsory up to the age of twenty-four. It might then be possible to educate 

 workmen in such a way that they could take a seat on boards of directors, from 

 which the gain to the industries of the country would be incalculable. 



Mr. A. A. Campbell Swinton delivered a most interesting address entitled 

 "Science and its Functions" to the Royal Society of Arts at their opening meeting 

 on November 21 last in which he traced the indebtedness of the human race 

 from the earliest times to scientific method and discovery. To arrive at some 

 measure of the vast changes that have been brought about, the position in 

 1754, the year in which the Society of Arts was founded, is compared with 

 that of to-day. At that time travel of all sorts was no more rapid or convenient 

 than in the days of the Romans ; public lighting was non-existent ; printing 

 slow and expensive. There were no proper systems either for water supply 

 or sewage disposal. Little or nothing was known of the causes and nature 

 of illness, of infection by bacilli or of treatment by inoculation. Anaesthetics 

 had not been applied and the marvels of modern surgery were undreamt of. 

 In fact, the general mode of life showed little improvement on the conditions 

 in civilised Europe in the days of the Antonines. The quotation which 

 follows is very much to the point : " Since the beginning of the world it is 

 not to the masses but to the few exceptional individuals that all great advances 

 have been due, and it is greatly to be deprecated that politicians who must, or at 

 any rate should, know better, continue to flatter the so-called working man by 

 telling him that he alone is the creator of wealth. . . . Still, it is highly necessary 

 that the masses should be educated to learn that unless those who have the 

 requisite capacity are afforded the necessary leisure and facilities to work at 

 research and invention, industries can be neither developed nor even maintained 

 in the face of the world's competition, and that the working man himself will be 

 the principal sufferer from the resulting stagnation and decay." 



In his Presidential Address delivered to the Rontgen Society on November 6, 

 1917, Capt. G. W. C. Kaye gives an account of some of the most recent advances 

 in the theory and practice of X-rays. The war has caused a wide extension of 

 their usefulness, eg. for the detection of contraband metals, the examination of 

 autogenous welds, and the detection of faults and blow-holes in steel and other 



