NOTES 495 



has to be done is so enormous and the scope is so varied, that there is room for 

 all the types of laboratory mentioned. The building up of any great scheme of 

 industrial research is necessarily slow ; the men to do the work require many 

 years of careful training and practical experience before they are fully equipped for 

 the tasks they have to perform. It is no work for heaven-sent geniuses, who can 

 be picked out from the vocations they now follow, and suddenly plunged into their 

 new task ; they must be highly trained, and must have that instinct for discovery, 

 for long and laborious experimenting, and for scientific reasoning that can only be 

 gained by careful and patient preparation. It is therefore necessary, in view of 

 the present position, that every available resource should be brought to bear, and 

 used to forward a work which is of vital importance, if our industrial position is 

 to be maintained in competition with other countries. The need is urgent, the 

 demand is great, and every one who can help should be pressed into the service 

 with the least possible delay, so that our efforts may not be too late. We have 

 seen too much, in the past, of the fatal results of the policy of " wait and see " ; 

 let us, in this connection, think well and act quickly. 



A House of Poetry 



At a dinner given on November 5 at the Lyceum Club by Mrs. Eyre Macklin 

 and her friends to the Poetry Society, Sir Ronald Ross, the President of the 

 Society, outlined his scheme for the creation of a House of Poetry, which he said 

 should consist of a worthy free library devoted to the world's poetry, with a room 

 for public readings, offices, and staff, situated in the best part of London. It was 

 required for two reasons, the better education of the British public, and to do 

 honour to the great poets. He made no secret of his opinion that the intellectual 

 level of the nation was below par, and referred to the saying of M. Taine, that 

 whereas every French workman knew his Lamartine and De Musset, only a 

 minute section of the British nation knew anything of their Tennyson and Swin- 

 burne. Although the Board of Education spent ^15,000,000 a year on the 

 education of our children, it spent nothing for the honour and study of the subject 

 of which education largely consists, the poetry in which, from the Bible to the 

 present day, the greatest thoughts of the greatest men have been enshrined. He 

 maintained that, like science, poelry was neglected in this country. While we 

 greatly honoured soldiers, governors, and even party politicians, we did nothing 

 whatever to honour those much greater men, the poets and the scientists. General 

 Smuts had said that the British Empire was held together merely by common 

 consent : one of the principal factors was our common and great literature, and 

 the coherence of the Empire of to-day probably depended more upon Shakespeare 

 than upon any other man. At the close of the dinner the whole of the large 

 company enthusiastically drank the health of the proposed House of Poetry. 



Poland and Poetry 



The influence and power of literature in general and poetry in particular over 

 the destinies of nations is most noticeable in the history of Poland. It was mainly 

 on this theme that Mr. Ladislas Czapski dilated in his two lectures on " Modern 

 Polish Literature and the National Movement and Social Reform in Poland," 

 delivered at King's College in November. He brought to the notice of his 

 audience the remarkable fact that Poland, though so long ruled by three different 

 powers each seeking to absorb her, is just as united in racial sentiment and 

 ambitions to-day as she was before the partition. The history of Poland for the 

 last hundred years or more has been nothing but a series of crushing defeats 



