674 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



carry on scientific investigation with greater facilities than the 



resources of his university afford him ? Above all, is it fair 



to the State and the local authority that the acquisition of 



knowledge on which future material prosperity must certainly 



depend should be the incidental work of men whose main 



professional interests are other than those of the investigation 



committed to them? We plead here for the recognition by 



the State of a distinct profession, that of scientific research 



apart altogether from the university organisation and traditions; 



as adequately remunerated as academic work, and with its own 



status and responsibilities. 



An Assistant. 



The Thomas Young Oration (delivered before the Optical Society by 

 Sir James Crichton-Browne on January 20, the President, 

 Dr. Ettles, being in the Chair) 



The orator stated that Young was a physicist, also a 

 physician, hydrographer, an entomologist, an actuary, a clima- 

 tologist, philologist, and an Egyptologist, and while specialists 

 in each of these departments recognise his distinguished ability 

 and penetrating insight, it is upon his optical discoveries that 

 his title to a high place in science must be founded. Young 

 was the founder of physiological optics, and has placed English 

 optical science in a position of unassailable superiority. Young 

 anticipated by a generation Helmholtz and Kalrausch's discovery 

 of the ophthalmometer, and to him is due the honour of the 

 discovery of accommodation, claimed by Germany for Helmholtz 

 and Cramer. All that was done by them was to demonstrate 

 in 1850 by the alteration of Purkinje's images what Young had 

 proved with far greater accuracy at the end of the eighteenth 

 century. One of the advantages of this grievous war in which 

 we are engaged must be that it will pull down from its pedestal 

 and shatter for ever the notion of the German overman in 

 science, literature, art, or ingenuity, created by German self- 

 assertion and supported by the effusive adulation of a few 

 professors of our own, proud of a smattering of second-rate 

 Teutonic learning. The success of Germany in many directions 

 has depended on its huge power of assimilation and on our 

 slackness in this country in permitting the appropriations by 

 her of what property belonged to us. Young's mental precocity 

 was extraordinary. We have his own testimony that at two 



