SCIENCE FOR LIFE 17 



lives to atudying conic sections. Had this devotion 

 any reward beyond the thrill of enlightenment ? Not 

 to speak of projectiles, the answer is given by our 

 great bridges, by the curves of our ships, by the rules 

 of navigation, and by much more besides. It was not 

 for practical purposes that William Smith tramped over 

 England exploring the strata, yet how much of the 

 exploitation of mineral resources of many a country 

 has had its origin in Smith's maps and their successors. 

 Over and over again, both in peace and war, the strati- 

 graphical geologist has saved a difficult situation. 

 Far-reaching recent improvements in metallurgy origin- 

 ated, though no one saw the seed sown, in 1861, when 

 H. C. Sorby in Sheffield began out of sheer inquisitiveness 

 to cut microscopic sections of rocks and meteorites. 

 When Professor William Thomson pubHshed in 1853, in 

 the Philosophical Magazine, a stiff bit of mathematical 

 analysis, which laid the foundation of the study of 

 electric oscillations, there can have been few who saw 

 in it one of the steps towards wireless telegraphy. 

 Or perhaps we should go further back still to Lagrange, 

 who led on to Thomson and Clerk Maxwell, as these 

 to Hertz. As Professor E. W. Hobson writes (Science and 

 tlie Nation, p. 92), Lagrange's work in purely abstract 

 mathematics " was an essential link in a chain of 

 investigation which led, on the practical side, to the 

 invention of wireless telegraphy." 



Pasteur's researches form an intellectual chain of 

 which the first link was a study of molecular dissymmetry 

 and the crystalline forms of tartrates. What would the 



B 



