36 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



best of our national resources, and the fact that the utilisation 

 of these is even now dwindling away under the repeated enteric 

 fever scares, point to a general lack of earnestness in State 

 Kultur, if we may use that misunderstood term. 



Quite a number of years ago Sir William Crookes, in a very 

 remarkable address to the British Association, spoke of the 

 progressive diminution of our supplies of available nitrogen 

 compounds. It is true that chemical science has since then 

 shown the way to make use of atmospheric nitrogen, but it is 

 still true, as the address insisted, that enormous quantities of 

 combined nitrogen run down the drains into the sea and are 

 lost. How practicably to make use of this nitrogen waste was 

 then, and is still, a difficult problem. Schemes of recovery by 

 means of the treatment of sewage, or the application of the 

 latter to the land have not, so far, been very successful, and one 

 therefore grasps all the more eagerly at the suggestions outlined 

 in this paper. Every estuarine sewage-polluted sea-area con- 

 tains nitrogen compounds which are capable of utilisation by 

 oysters, mussels, cockles and other shellfish either directly or 

 as the result of intermediate metabolic processes. Even now 

 it has been shown to be possible, on the large scale be it noted, 

 to increase the yield of a shellfish bed enormously by trans- 

 plantation of the molluscs into sewage-polluted waters. The 

 subsequent removal of sewage bacteria so taken up by the 

 animals as an accident of their feeding can also be ensured by 

 redeposition for a day or two at the most in clean sea water. 

 All these measures are practicable and have, indeed, already 

 been undertaken ; and only sufficiently planned scientific 

 investigation and industrial enterprise (but always scientific 

 research) are necessary to make them generally applicable. It 

 will, for ever, be a bitter reflection that expenditure on the 

 grand scale should have been so willingly sanctioned by the 

 nation for war-purposes, while the expenditure on scientific and 

 industrial research, infinitesimal as it has been by comparison, 

 should have been so niggardly sanctioned. The necessity of 

 our national existence has made the former expenditure an 

 imperative one ; but, thinking far ahead, and in a general way^ 

 is not the latter expenditure just as imperative ? 



