APPENDIX A XXXIX 



with great power of organization and co-ordination. The Germans 

 fully believed that they alone were endowed with the attributes of 

 mind which combined an infinite capacity for taking pains with powers 

 of scientific co-operation. What a mistake! When in 1917 and 1918 

 the colossal mechanism of the British Empire began to work in unison, 

 the whole of England became one vast, interlacing, co-ordinated 

 system of chemical, physical and engineering laboratories. The 

 result was that, by virtue of this scientific co-ordination and system, 

 England made better synthetic drugs, commercial dyes, and even 

 those used for sensitising photographic films, than her enemies, while 

 munitions and the lethal gases were prepared on a larger scale and by 

 better methods than were used in Germany. The result was soon seen, 

 the supremacy of the forces of the Allies upon sea and land, and espe- 

 cially in the air, was in no small degree due to the men whose lives had 

 been devoted to the pursuit of pure science in university laboratories — 

 the men with a hobby for research. 



The problems in science presented to the Allies by the war were 

 not only improvements in engines or explosives or guns, which could 

 be effected by the inventive genius of engineers and technical 

 chemists, but higher and more fundamental problems in synthetic 

 chemistry, light, heat, and electricity, such as could only be successfully 

 attacked by those with a profound scholarly knowledge of science and 

 scientific method. The vital problems of the war were those which 

 called, not for the advertised inventive wizard, but for the scientific 

 investigator — the man who by his own laboratory investigations had 

 added to the world's knowledge. 



A recent writer of experience (Vernon Kellogg) reports regarding 

 war inventions: — "Every major belligerent had a board of inventions 

 and research, to which every man with an idea was asked to 

 communicate that idea. All of these boards had precisely the same 

 experience — in England, France, Italy and the United States. They 

 all agree that not one suggestion in ten thousand, which came in in 

 this way, was of any value whatever, and that the occasional worth- 

 while idea, which was presented to these boards, was in general 

 arrived at earlier in other ways. We would have less cause for 

 satisfaction regarding the result of the war, had the Allies depended 

 upon the undirected, inventive genius of the people to make the 

 applications of science." 



Probably never before in the history of pure science had men, 

 who have devoted their lives to it, such an opportunity of demonstrat- 

 ing its value to the world. The stimulus to effort was simply enorm- 

 ous and the growth of our knowledge was astonishing. 



Proc, Sig. 4 



