n6 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



will do well to take warning from Russia and to learn that prosperity and political 

 claptrap cannot exist together. 



We have received from Dr. Appiah of Madras a most interesting book, 

 Swami Ram Tirtha, M.A., His Life and Teachings (Ganesh & Co., Madras, 

 2 vols.), full of the Swami's essays (in English). It is astonishing how any one 

 could have written so well in what was to him a foreign language. The philosophy 

 is to us very largely unreal ; but reality breaks from the clouds every moment, and 

 the portraits of the author (now dead) assure us that his was a singular and 

 beautiful personality. The book is an unconscious psychological study of modern 

 India — full of mysticism, perhaps, but also of high thought, poetry, and a noble 

 philosophy of duty. 



Brains and Bravery 



Our press is always loud in deserved praise of the bravery of our soldiers, but 

 seldom says anything of the skill, sagacity or military learning of our generals, 

 so that one would think that these qualities are little valued by our public. In 

 March, however, we were amazed to hear that the Germans had invented a 

 cannon capable of delivering a shell seventy-four miles away, and then a few 

 Britons began to recognise that even brains may be of as much value in war as 

 bravery is. In Nature of March 28, Sir G. Greenhill, F.R.S., wrote that "the 

 German gunner has ' wiped the eye ' of our artillery science " ; and the news- 

 papers, especially the Morning Post, commented in strong terms on the slackness 

 of our politicians and officials, educated as most of them are merely on a pabulum 

 of dead languages. This censure is deserved, for every one remarks on the fact 

 that the Germans have led the way in this war, not so much in making new 

 inventions, as in utilising old ones — Zeppelins, submarines, aeroplanes, poison 

 gas — while the allies have only tanks and helmets to their score, and therefore 

 seem to be always on the defensive against the " diabolical new inventions " of 

 the enemy. Yet the British, French and Americans are all much more radically 

 inventive than the plantigrade Germans. Why, then, are they now so behind- 

 hand in warlike inventions ? Probably because their inventors cannot so easily 

 persuade the authorities to adopt or even to consider their ideas. And why not? 

 Because the Germans have long made a scientific study ' of war, fully recognise 

 the disconcerting effect of new inventions on the enemy, and do everything 

 possible to exploit them. The British, on the contrary, though they themselves 

 are the most faddy and irrational people in the world, look upon inventors with as 

 much contempt as they bestow upon poets, artists, composers, men of science, 

 tacticians, strategists, and all the rest of the " intellectuals," down even to 

 philosophers. The gentlemen who grow fat and stupid in shops, banks, offices, 

 and parliament naturally despise the lean and keen acolytes of the Goddess of 

 Ideas — are too highly uneducated in Latin grammar to understand their ex- 

 planations, or even too dull after lunch to hear them : while the masses possess 

 higher ideals in the comedians of the music-hall or the hustings, or in Bounding 

 Bill of the Prairies. As Prince Lichnowsky, recently the German Ambassador in 

 London, has said admiringly of us, "An hospitable house with friendly guests is 

 worth more [in England] than the profoundest scientific knowledge, and a learned 

 man of insignificant appearance and too small means would, in spite of all his 



1 According to a quotation on page 10 of Mr. Wilmore's The Great Crime 

 (Hodder & Stoughton), the Germans were publishing 700 books on the science of 

 war annually, to, say, 20 books published in England. 



