December 3, 1914] 



NATURE 



379 



tion. In the matter of commerce and manutactures, 

 also, there have been in the past, and still here and 

 there survive, doubts as to whether our interests are 

 identical. But that our scientific interests are the 

 same is a doctrine which is received everywhere with- 

 out question, and this community of scientific interests 

 serves to bind together the constituent parts of the 

 British Empire none the less firmly because it also 

 helps to link us severally and collectively to the rest 

 of the civilised world. For scientific knowledge and 

 the benefits which accrue from it are never confined 

 within the limits of any barrier, either of race or 

 nationality-, but are free to all people and to all 

 nations. This fact has been long recognised, and we 

 find in the history of Captain Cook's voyages a re- 

 markable illustration of the principle (of communitv 

 of scientific interest), in the rescript sent during his 

 third voyage of discovery in the year 1779 by the 

 Secretary for the Marine Department of France, with 

 whom England was then at war, directing all captains 

 of armed vessels who may meet "that famous navi- 

 gator, Captain Cook," to treat him as a commander 

 of a neutral and allied Power. A similar order was 

 issued to all captains and commanders of armed ships 

 acting by commission from Congress bv the 

 .\mbassador of the United States to the Court of 

 France, directing them to treat Captain Cook with 

 all civility and kindness, affording him as a common 

 friend to mankind all the assistance in their power, 

 and assuring them that by so doing they might de- 

 pend on obtaining the approbation of Congress. 

 Franklin was, it is true, mistaken in the confidence 

 he expressed regarding the sentiments which were 

 likely to actuate Congress, the members of which dis- 

 played less enlightenment than their distinguished 

 representative— but this is a commodity with which 

 members of Parliament and Congress aie not always 

 too well provided even at the present day. 



About the time of that first scientific expedition 

 which I have ventured to use as a convenient intro- 

 duction to a Brisbane audience. Watt was engaged 

 in carrying out those improvements in the construction 

 of machines which ushered in the age of steam and 

 steel, and were eventually destined to enable us, 

 within the period of our academic holidays, to hold 

 our annual gathering at this end of the globe. Chem- 

 istry was beginning to feel its feet. Priestley had 

 prepared carbon dioxide, and Lavoisier soon after- 

 wards isolated oxygen. Discoveries were in the air, 

 although the progress of science was very perceptibly 

 checked by the long wars and general social disturb- 

 ances which followed the French Revolution. After 

 these wars ensued a period of exhaustion, during 

 which commerce was only very gradually recovering 

 her position, and although science was progressing, it 

 was with relative slowness. Nevertheless, in Great 

 Britain the important investigations of Humphry' 

 Davy into the chemical constitution of the alkalies, 

 resulting in the discovery of several new metals, form 

 a marked exception to this general statement; and 

 Davy's successor, Faraday, was, in the twenties of 

 the nineteenth century, commencing those brilliant 

 researches which, with the previous work of Oersted 

 and Ampere, form the basis of our knowledge of 

 electricity and magnetism. The first publication of 

 Faraday's discoveries of voltaic induction and the 

 relation of electricity to magnetism took place in the 

 year of the foundation of the Association, and the last 

 of the more important of his papers on this 

 subject appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of 

 1S51. 



Two or three years before the York meeting, the 

 absolute barrier which was thought to exist between 

 the organic and inorganic world was broken down by 



NO. 2353, VOL. 94] 



the discovery of Woehler that urea — until that time 

 considered a purely animal product — could be prepared 

 synthetically from inorganic materials. In biology 

 matters had not moved so much. Nearly everybody 

 still believed, in spite of the brilliant and suggestive 

 theories of Lamarck and Laplace, that the round 

 world and all that therein is was the result of a 

 single act of creation which had occurred some four 

 thousand odd years previously ; and another thirly 

 years were to elapse before that comfortable belief 

 was shattered by the epoch-making observations and 

 brilliant generalisation of Darwin and Wallace. The 

 mere enumeration of everything that has grown out 

 of the investigations and discoveries of the great men 

 I have mentioned would much more than occupy the 

 whole time allotted to this discourse. All the resources 

 of modern civilisation, whether for peace or war, are 

 indeed the direct result of the researches in physics 

 and chemistry to which I have alluded, although 

 many of these researches may have seemed at the 

 time to be of purely scientific interest and to have no 

 application to human needs. One can imagine a 

 member of the audience at the Royal Institution ask- 

 ing Davy, " What can be the possible use of knowing 

 that gases can be liquefied?" although no such ques- 

 tion would be likely to be put to the present dis- 

 tinguished occupant of Dav\-'s chair; or another 

 member telling Faraday that his demonstration of 

 the rotation of one coil of wire within another might 

 make a prett\' enough toy, but could never be of any 

 practical utility. 



Similar questions and remarks are still made 

 whenever a discover}' which is purely scientific . 

 is announced. Shades of Galileo and Galvani ! 

 Will the world never profit by the lessons 

 which the historj' of science teaches it? Has it not 

 again and again been shown that the establishment 

 of a fact which at first sight seemed to furnish no 

 possible utilitarian application has eventually far out- 

 weighed in its importance any number of discoveries 

 which are capable of being immediately utilised in 

 commerce or manufacture? You have, I suppose, all 

 heard of the eminent man of science who thanked 

 God that a discovery he had made could never, so 

 far as he could see, be of the slightest use to any 

 living creature ! Probably he is apocryphal ; but we 

 see that there is some basis for his expression of 

 gratitude, since it has again and again occurred that 

 discoveries which appeared to be of no utility were 

 pregnant with immense issues. Who could have 

 thought it possible that Pasteur's investigation into 

 the constitution of racemic salts would have led to 

 a complete revolution in our knowledge of medicine 

 and surgery-, and in our methods of treatment, 

 a revolution so complete as even to involve the 

 use of a different kind of language to express the 

 difference of conception of disease which characterises 

 modern medicine as compared with that which was 

 practised even so recently as the seventies of the last 

 centur>'? And although it is mainly to Lister that 

 we owe the application of Pasteur's chemical and 

 biological researches to surgery, we must not forget 

 that their application to disease in general was due 

 to the great French chemist. 



It is not given to every man, as it was 

 to Pasteur and Lister, to witness the full 

 development of the discoveries which their ex- 

 periments have initiated, or to receive during their 

 lifetime the honour which is their due, and in most 

 cases little or no benefit comes in the way of the 

 actual discoverer. It is the man who applies the 

 scientific discover)' to the exigencies of manufacture 

 or to commerce who reaps the har\'est of the golden 

 shekels. Not that we grudge it to him ! But I 



