NEW GENERATION OF SCIENTISTS—HAWKINS 429 
the concentration of population in our large cities with their towering 
skyscrapers; created our gigantic electrical networks, bringing cheap 
and convenient light, heat, and power into every workship and nearly 
every home; enormously increased the output of labor, while greatly 
reducing human drudgery and shortening hours; raised the standard 
of living, until now the average man enjoys in his home such luxuries 
as no king could command a hundred years ago; annihilated time 
in communications between individuals and between nations; and 
brought such understanding of the marvelous mechanism of our bodies 
and of the ills that assail it that the average span of human life has 
been increased by a quarter century in a hundred years. On the other 
side of the ledger, these same advances have added to our social 
problems by salvaging countless numbers of the physically unfit and 
allowing them to reproduce their kind; have brought temporary but 
severe dislocations of industry and employment through the develop- 
ment of new materials, processes, and devices; and have multiplied 
many fold the horrors and devastation of war. 
Surely no one should be called cultured who has no realization of 
the revolutionary changes produced by the tremendous impact of 
science on our civilization. 
STUDY OF SCIENCE DEVELOPS HABIT OF OBJECTIVE THINKING 
And science has a special value possessed by none of its associates 
in the school curriculum. It contributes to the most important func- 
tion in education: it develops, as no other study does, clear and in- 
dependent thinking. 
Mathematics, it is true, calls upon and develops the reasoning pow- 
ers, but its nature is essentially abstract. Bertrand Russell has said, 
“Mathematics may be defined as a subject in which we never know 
what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.” 
I have known more than one man who was an expert mathematician 
but who was helpless in the face of a physical problem, until someone 
else bridged the gap by pointing out what physical principles were 
involved and how they applied, thus bringing the problem to the 
point where pure mathematical technique could be brought to bear. 
Still more helpless would he have been, had it been necessary to de- 
termine by experiment the nature and mode of application of the 
principles involved. 
Mathematics is a most essential tool for science, but mathematics 
divorced from scientific observation can tell us little about the world 
we live in. 
It is the study of science, and that alone, which enables us to ob- 
serve our surroundings clearly, to perceive their interrelations, and 
to derive valid and useful conclusions concerning them. 
