42 PHYSICAL RESEARCH 



and manufactures, all human operations in which 

 the laws of heat or light or sound or electricity 

 play a part, and consider what a blank there would 

 be in our work and our lives. Electric light,, 

 electric motors, telegraph and telephone, steam 

 engines and gas engines, the photographic camera, 

 the microscope and the telescope, the work of the 

 oculist, all these details are obvious and direct. 

 But in a thousand other ways, in the details of 

 a bridge or a house, a ship or an aeroplane, of a 

 chronometer or a motor, or any construction one 

 likes to name, these great sciences must continually 

 be consulted. Without them there would be 

 little or nothing. In a sense the work of the world 

 animate and inanimate goes on by their leave, 

 and the more we know of them, the more we can 

 appreciate all that we see and hear. 



Yet all we know of these laws has been dis- 

 covered as "pure" science, that is to say in the 

 course of a quest which was not directed to any 

 special discovery or invention or application. We 

 must not starve, therefore, the research into pure 

 science. We must provide the time and money 

 for research laboratories and institutions, and we 

 must do so on a far more liberal scale than in the 

 past. And first of all perhaps, it is time that 

 must be paid for. Those who are able to investi- 

 gate are so often found in positions which absorb 

 the bulk of their time and energy for teaching 

 and management. They are accustomed to work 



