5t4 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Bristol professors should exercise even a restraining influence 

 upon the executive body, which has gone so far as to lay down 

 the astonishing principle that criticism of the Council or its 

 proceedings is incompatible with the duty of a teacher of the 

 University — a principle, we may remark, incompatible with 

 academic and personal freedom and fatal to administrative 

 efficiency. 



On what lines the reform of Bristol University should 

 proceed it is not for us to speak dogmatically. It may, however, 

 here be premised that it is essential that the Statutes of the 

 University, which define the conditions under which the large 

 powers granted to the University are to be exercised, should 

 be strictly observed in spirit and in the letter; and that the 

 professors, who form collectively the Senate, should hold their 

 offices by a tenure as good as that enjoyed by the professors 

 in similar institutions, or, at least, by the tenure required by the 

 Advisory Committee of the Board of Education. These are 

 mere details, but it is certain that reform is a condition sine qua 

 non if Bristol University is to emerge from under its cloud and 

 to gain the respect of other academies and the confidence of 

 the public. 



Evolution and War 



The London School of Economics and Political Science is 

 packed away in a small building near Kingsway, but it is one of 

 the most flourishing and fruitful schools of the University of 

 London ; and the meetings of its Students' Union sometimes 

 attract quite a considerable audience of students and their 

 friends. Of this kind was the meeting held on November 4 

 under the chairmanship of Mr. Edward Twentyman, when Sir 

 Ronald Ross addressed the Union on the subject of Evolution 

 and War. 



Sir Ronald made the present war the text of his speech. He 

 referred to a sanguinary combat which he had witnessed once in 

 Burma. His audience listening to the detailed horrors of it were 

 relieved at length to learn that the battles had been of ants and 

 not of men ; but starting from this point, the speaker indicated 

 the number of directions in which the combative instinct appeared 

 to operate throughout Nature, with apparently disastrous results 

 to the individual. Why, he asked, did Nature allow such an 



