{'RKSIDKKT S ADDRESS. 3 



remains a stunted travesty of the full-orbed science that seeks 

 the highest ideals of knowled_2^c in every realm. 



And so Principal Beattie was unquestionably right some 

 months ago when he said that the present world contest is a 

 struggle not between nations, but between ideals. Admittedly 

 neither ideal is perfect, but the ideal that is low and grovelling 

 and sordid and selfish is obviously the ideal of a mind that has 

 no vision for anything loftier. If science is to confer the highes^t 

 benefits on mankind, its outlook must be ever broadening, and 

 to a truly scientific people there should be nothing tending to 

 prejudice or dogmatism resulting from a circumscribed range 

 of A-ision. 



In one of his " short stories," H. G. Wells describes con- 

 ditions amongst a race of degenerated human beings, who vege- 

 tated in a mysteriously isolated and forgotten valley amongst the 

 mountains — a valley that had in it all that the heart of man could 

 desire — sweet water, verdant pastures, glorious climate — -but a 

 valley cut off from the outside world, less bv reason of the ice- 

 capped clifTs of rock that walled it in than because of the fact 

 that 15 generations ago a strange disease had seized upon the 

 dwellers in that valley, and had left to them total blindness as 

 an inheritance. The walls of ice that isolated them geographically 

 they could have surmounted, as man's ingenuity often scales the 

 highest of material difficulties, btit the sightlessness which 

 hemmed them in mentally cut them ofif efifectually from the world 

 of men. 



The most serious obstacles to the advancement of a country 

 are not geographical. When a great movement is in progress 

 one sometimes finds that those who should be in the van fail 

 to lead because they lack discernment. It was not Nelson who 

 was blind at Copenhagen, but the amiable and kindly Sir Hyde 

 Parker, who seldom ventured to take responsibility, while Nelson, 

 when he put the telescope to his blind eye, had really the clearer 

 vision of the two. Now South Africa had been geographically 

 cut of¥ from the centres o'f scientific activity in the Northern 

 Hemisphere for generations, but to-day all the important hap- 

 penings of Europe are flashed across 6,000 miles of ocean in a 

 few hours. The opening decades of last century brought no less 

 sensation in the way of scientific discovery to our forefathers than 

 the discoveries of the last 18 years have brought to us, and one 

 of the chief contributors to the new light that dawned on men a 

 century ago was Prof. Hans Christian Oersted, of Copenhagen, 

 who laid the foundations of electro-magnetism by his discovery 

 that the electrical current of a galvanic battery, when passed 

 through a platinum wire, acted on a compass needle placed below 

 the wire. 



Every naval man at the beginning of last century was not as 

 clear-sighted as Nelson, and illustrations may be quoted of some 

 of very different type who, it is much to be feared, still have 

 representatives amongst us in this rapidly closing second decade 

 of the twentieth century, as they had amongst our ancestors in 

 the second decade of the nineteenth. 



