PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. — SECTION II. 2g 



of alarm has been clearly and repeatedly sounded. Two years 

 ago the occupant of the Presidential chair of the Chemical Society 

 of London constituted his address a rousing cry to action on this 

 account. 



" A temporary flicker of excitement is caused " (said he) " when sonie 

 sensational discovery is announced, or when some result of immediate prac- 

 tical (commercial) value is made known, but even in these cases the interest 

 taken is only transitorj' and is narrowed down to the immediate issue ; the 



broad cause which makes such results possible is lost sight of It 



is not always recognised that the so-called practical achievements .... 

 do not spring already perfected from the fertile brain of some ' inventor,' 

 but are always led up to by numerous discoveries which, according to the 

 national standard of valuation, would be considered worthless."* 



Can anyone, after seeing the immense benefit that radium and 

 the X rays are conferring on mankind to-day, especially in con- 

 nection with diseases like cancer and lupus, and with surgical 

 practice generally, dare to go back and sneer at that Frenchm.an 

 and his wife endeavouring to extract from pitch-blende an element 

 of which it contains a smaller proportion than sea-water contains 

 gold ; or at the Wiirzburg professor, a dozen years ago, experiment- 

 ing, apparently aimlessly, with magnets, and vacuum tubes, and 

 cathode rays. Possibly there were utilitarians who scouted the 

 idea of any economic importance being attached to Clerk-Maxwell's 

 theories regarding the electro-magnetic nature of light : but after 

 half a century, those theories are now bearing fruit in a very prac- 

 tical way. Disasters at sea have repeatedly demonstrated, within 

 the last twelve months, the unspeakable value of the Marconi 

 telegraphic apparatus ; but if the late Professor Hertz of Bonn 

 had been a Government ofificer his experiments of twenty-one 

 years ago on the deflection of electro-magnetic waves by sheets 

 of zinc might have been looked upon as so much waste of time. 



There is a kind of utilitarianism which admits that some good 

 may ultimately flow from research, but holds back because genera- 

 tions may pass ere it fructifies : that may be so, but each generation 

 has its own crop of definite practical fruits, and we now reap where 

 our grandfathers, with unselfish foresight, have sown ; and further- 

 more, many researches in pure science bear practical fruit almost 

 immediately, witness the applications of radium. The fact is that 

 the man who sneers at and snuffs out research is pursuing a very 

 selfish, short-sighted policy, and we simply cannot afford to continue 

 such thriftlessness. 



I am not aware that, outside the region of astronomy, any 

 original researches in physical chemistry have ever arrived at 

 fruition — or even originated — in South Africa, and as to researches 

 in organic chemistry there is likewise nothing to tell ; but in 

 analytical chemistry rather more vitality has been exhibited. 

 Occasional papers on analytical processes, emanating from South 

 African workers, are to be seen at times in British and other 

 periodicals devoted to chemical science : within the last eighteen 

 months, for instance, I recollect noticing such contributions from 

 Mr. W. Bettel, of Johannesburg ; Dr. J. Moir, of the Mines Depart- 



* Prof. R. Meldola : Trans. Chem. Soc, Vol. 91, pp. 628, 631. 



