18 INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 



Let me close with a few remarks of local — Australasian — 

 interest. The great advances that I have sketched are, of course, 

 attributable in the main to European workers. Yet we may, I 

 think, take some satisfaction in the fact that teachers and students 

 of the Universities in this part of the world, or graduates who 

 have gone Home from here, have contributed somewhat from 

 time to time. These Australasian contributions include work on 

 the general theory of solution, on the mobilities of ions, on electrode 

 potentials, on conductivity in aqueous and other solutions, on the 

 dynamics of chemical change, on gaseous ions, and on radio-active 

 phenomena. In this last connection I would specially remind you 

 that Professor Rutherford, who may be said to have conferred on 

 the study of radio-activity the dignity of a special science by his 

 theory of transformations, is a New Zealand graduate, and that 

 my immediate predecessor in this presidential chair. Professor 

 Bragg, gained fame for himself and for Adelaide by his brilliant 

 researches in this field before he accepted his present appointment 

 at Leeds. 



The older Universities of Australasia are growing, and new 

 ones are arising, as in Brisbane and Perth. NaturaUy and inevitably 

 there is a tendency nowadays to ask of Universities a greatly 

 increased attention to the more utilitarian developments of Science. 

 It is so in England, where for instance the LTniversity of Sheffield 

 devotes a great department to the metallurgy of iron, and that of 

 Leeds cultivates its schools of textile fabrics, dyeing, and domestic 

 economy. It is so in Australia, where there is a steady pressure 

 put upon the Universities to develop increasingly on the lines of 

 techncial schools. All this is, doubtless, as it must be ; but it is 

 beset with a certain danger. The risk is that the whole energies 

 of these institutions, where teachers are always too few and equip- 

 ment is never too plentiful, will be directed towards the useful 

 applications of Science, and Science itself will be neglected. This, 

 if it occurs, will be a pitiful result, and will not tend to raise 

 Australia among the intellectual countries of the world. Let us 

 be a practical people and have due regard to utility ; but let us 

 also have some means and leisure to cultivate the vastly more 

 interesting inutilities, for thus only can we hope to increase 

 Australasia's contribution to the true Advancement of Science. 



