214 



NATURE 



[October 22, 1914 



as a literary man— Thomas Henry Huxley; he was 

 then surgeon on board the surveying ship Rattlesnake. 

 In 1848 Huxley visited Sydney, and there met the 

 g-racious lady, only recently deceased, who became his 

 wife. In after years he achieved a great reputation 

 on account of his services to education. 



Lecturing in London in 1854, he defined science as 

 " trained and organised common sense " — a definition 

 often quoted since; none could be more apposite, 

 though it must be remembered that "common sense," 

 after all, is but an uncommon sense. 



A few years later, in a public lecture at South Ken- 

 sington, Huxley spoke to the following efTect : — 



'"The whole of modern thought is steeped in science; 

 it has made its way into the works of our best poets 

 and even the mere man of letters, who affects to 

 ignore and despise science, is unconsciously impreg- 

 nated with her spirit and indebted for his best products 

 to her methods. I believe that the greatest intellectual 

 revolution mankind has yet seen is now slowly taking 

 place by her agency. She is teaching the world that 

 the ultimate court of appeal is observation and experi- 

 ment and not authority ; she is teaching it the value 

 of evidence ; she is creating a firm and living faith 

 in the existence of immutable moral and physical laws 

 perfect obedience to which is the highest possible aini 

 of an intelligent being. 



■' But of all this your old stereotyped system of 

 education takes no note. Physical science, its methods, 

 its problems and its difficulties, will meet the poorest 

 boy at every turn, and yet we educate him in such 

 a manner that he shall enter the world as ignorant 

 of the existence of the methods and facts of science 

 as the day he was born. The modern world is full of 

 artillery : and we turn our children out to do battle in 

 it equipped with the' shield and sword of an ancient 

 gladiator. 



■ Posterity ii'lll cry shame on us if zve do not remedy 

 this deplorable state of things. Nay, if we live twenty 

 years longer, our own consciences will cry shame on 

 us." 



These words were uttered in 1861. Now, after more 

 than fifty years, not twenty merely, we still go naked 

 and unashamed of our ignorance : seemingly, there is 

 no conscience within us to cry shame on us. I have 

 no hesitation in saying that, at home, at all events, 

 whatever your state here may be, we have done but 

 little through education to remedy the condition of 

 public ignorance which Huxley deplored. In point 

 of fact, he altogether underrated the power of the 

 forces of ignorance and indifference ; he failed to fore- 

 see that these were likely to grow rather than to fall 

 into abeyance. In England, what I will venture to 

 term the Oxford spirit still reigns supreme — the spirit 

 of the literary class — the medieval spirit of obscurant- 

 ism, which favours a backward rather than a forward 

 outlook. 



Wherein was Huxley out in his forecast? In 1861 

 the claim of science was already strong, but think 

 what has been done since that time — what we can now 

 assert of its conquests! In the interval, even within 

 my recollection, _ the whole of our ironclad fleet has 

 been created, rifled cannon, smokeless powder and 

 dynamite have been introduced, and this last, in com- 

 bination with the discovery of the causes of vellow 

 fever and malaria, has made the Panama Canal pos- 

 sible, an entirelv revolutionary work of man's inter- 

 fering hands. The Great Eastern, which could not be 

 launched at first on account of her size — as a lad, I 

 saw her sticking in the stocks — was alwavs a failure, 

 because she was outside the fashion of her time, yet 

 has given rise to a host of ocean leviathians of far 

 larger size ; the steam-turbine has entered into rivalry 

 with the reciprocating steam-engine ; cold storage has 

 revolutionised ocean transport, so that fresh food can 

 NO. 2347, VOL. 94] 



be carried from this continent to remote England and 

 Europe. Electricity, then a puling infant, is grown 

 to giant size ; not only have we deep-sea telegraphy 

 and mechanical speech in the form of the phonograph 

 and telephone, but wireless communication, the elec- 

 tric light, electric transmission of power, electric trac- 

 tion — even the waterfalls of the world are tamed 

 through the turbine and made subservient to our will 

 for motive purposes or in the production of tempera- 

 tures bordering on those of solar heat, by means of 

 which, too, we can draw food for plants, at will, from 

 our atmosphere by combining its constituents into the 

 form of a fertiliser. The use of oil-fuel in the internal- 

 combustion engine has been made possible and, in a 

 few short years, our streets have been cleared of horse 

 conveyances and crowded with motor-vehicles ; such 

 engines are coming into use everywhere and have 

 enabled us successfully to perform the feat which 

 Daedalus vainly attempted — we even talk of flying 

 from New York to London, across the vast Atlantic, 

 to spend the week-end. The cyanide process has been 

 introduced into gold-mining and is enabling us to 

 unearth a fabulous wealth ; a vast array of gorgeous 

 colours has been produced, and Dame Nature so out- 

 witted that we make indigo and madder out of the tar 

 which in old days was put only upon fences ; Pasteur's 

 work has made Listerism possible, so that nothing is 

 now beyond the surgeon's art and bacteriology is 

 become the handmaid of preventive medicine and sani- 

 tary science ; not only paper but a silk is made arti- 

 ficially from wood-pulp and the finest of scents are 

 conjured out from all but waste materials. A multi- 

 tude of other discoveries of practical value might be 

 referred to. 



Not so long ago, when scientific research was spoken 

 of, the cry was always Ciii bono? What's the good 

 of it all? Now, no one has the patience to listen to a 

 recital of the benefits accruing to mankind from its 

 operation ; for all the achievements I have referred to 

 are not the work of inere inventors but primarily the 

 outcome of scientific discovery : thus our modern com- 

 mand of electricity is very largely traceable to the 

 labours of the great philosopher Faraday, who worked 

 in an ill-lighted and cramped laboratory in the Rojal 

 Institution in Albemarle Street, London, with no other 

 object than that of contributing to the advancement 

 of knowledge. 



Perhaps the greatest of all the scientific achievements 

 of our time remains to be mentioned — the promulga- 

 tion of the doctrine of evolution by Charles Darwin. 

 Few perhaps can realise what this means for man- 

 kind, the intellectual advance it constitutes — that 

 through it we have at last acquired full intellectual 

 freedom and the belief that it rests with ourselves 

 alone rightly to order our lives ; that by it all dogmas 

 have been undermined. 



Science is coine into being and has prospered only 

 since freedom of thought was secured : on no other 

 terms can it be. It is well that we should bear this 

 in mind. The growth of numbers and of democracy 

 may well involve a restriction of freedom in all direc- 

 tions — none are so intolerant as the ignorant. 



If in science, to-day, we have something unknown 

 to former civilisations, what is its in/luence to be on 

 the future of the world, in particular on the future 

 of the white people? If we are not to suffer the rise 

 and fall which all previous civilisations have passed 

 through — rather let me say, if the period of our fall 

 is to be retarded beyond the period our forerunners 

 enjoyed, it will be solely because we wield and use 

 the powers science has put into our hands : not so 

 much those of abstract science but the broad wisdom 

 which the proper cultivation of science should confer; 

 hence it is that I desire to urge the absolute import- 

 ance of giving, through science, a place to the cultiva- 



