February 22, 1900] 



NATURE 



395 





the improved types of lenses for lighthouse apparatus 

 recently invented by Mr. Charles A. Stevenson, which he 

 has termed the equiangular refractor, and that of the 

 writer known as the inverse equiangular. 



With respect to the smaller classes of lights, there are 

 the new permanent lights burning for some weeks with- 

 out the attention of a keeper, which are largely used in 



II 1,1 I I 



"" i('iii( i iff ''" 



I'.Mi Ulill i' 

 ]l||)|llH|l 



Fig. 4.— Spindle eclipsing apparatus. (Front elevation.) 



the French Lighthouse Service. In these lights the upper 

 portion of the wick is carbonised, so that no turning up 

 or down thereof is necessary, and the supply of oil 

 which feeds the lamps is of such a quantity and is so 

 regulated that the lights burn without any attention 

 whatsoever for many days. J. A. PURVES. 



A 



MR. BALFOUR ON SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. 

 SPECIAL festival dinner of friends of King's 

 College, London, was held on Wednesday in last 

 week, with the object of directing attention to the want 

 of new laboratories, especially laboratories for physio- 

 logical and bacteriological research, and promoting the 

 collection of funds to supply the need. Mr. Balfour 

 presided, and he made excellent use of the occasion by 

 advocating the fuller recognition of the value of scientific 

 research, and increased opportunities for carrying on 

 original investigations. The encouragement of scientific 

 NO 1582, VOL. 61] 



research is a national responsih^ility, which has hitherto 

 not been adequately realised either by the State, by 

 public bodies, or by private individuals. Mr. Balfour's 

 remarks, reprinted below, from the Times, will serve to 

 remind people of the influence of science upon national 

 progress and prosperity, and may thus lead to a more 

 liberal provision of resources for assisting the advance- 

 ment of natural knowledge. 



We have all of us, probably, been stirred, either in making 

 speeches or in listening to speeches, in recent years on the sub- 

 ject of technical education— a very loose phrase sometimes used, 

 or misused, to mean education in manipulation or dexterity of 

 hand treatment ; sometimes, and I think more properly, used 

 to mean that application of science or of the principles of science 

 to industrial life, which we are more and more beginning to 

 recognise is the increasing need of the age in which we live. 

 It has been found easy, and I hope it always will be easy, to 

 enlist popular interest in anything so useful as the application of 

 scientific method to industrial pursuits. It will be all the more 

 easy because of the fact that we have before us in certain 

 countries striking and admirable instances of the success which 

 attends, or may attend, such application of scientific method to 

 industrial pursuits. .\x\ appeal for that purpose is an appeal 

 which touches the heart of everybody nearly or remotely con- 

 nected with the industries on which this nation as a whole lives, 

 and on which it must continue to live if it is to live at all. 



I appeal for something not less necessary, though for some- 

 thing perhaps more remote from the ordinary everyday popular 

 educational interest ; for I appeal on the present occasion, not 

 so much for anything in the nature of technical instruction or 

 applied science as for aid to carry out that instruction in science 

 itself and those researches in pure science which lie at the base 

 of that instructicm which, from the very nature of the case, can 

 only appeal indirectly and remotely to the great mass of man- 

 kind. And yet, after all, science is the essential matter that we 

 have got to consider ; its applications will come and must come, 

 will come almost of themselves, must come in the course of 

 time ; but you cannot have applied science without having science 

 in the first instance, and if you do not cultivate scientific research 

 and scientific education, it will be in vain that you multiply 

 your technical classes, it will be in vain that you labour to erect 

 a great superstructure where your foundations have been so in- 

 adequately laid. I feel it the more incumbent upon me to urge 

 upon you the claims and the glories of science pursued for itself 

 from the fact that they cannot directly appeal to the general 

 interest of the mass of mankind. We ought not to wonder, 

 we ought not to criticise, and we ought not to be surprised that, 

 among the great number of persons deeply interested and 

 astonished at, for example, anything so interesting and sen- 

 sational as wireless telegraphy, few remember the inventions 

 which have made that telegraphy possible ; they neither know 

 of nor take interest in the investigations of a Maxwell or the 

 experiments of a Hertz, which, after all, are at the base of the 

 whole thing, without which any such discovery as wireless tele- 

 graphy would not have been possible, but who, as discoverers, 

 had fame and recognition among scientific men capable of under- 

 standing their work, yet who have not, perhaps, even now that 

 world-wide reputation, that currency in the mouths of men, 

 which fall to inventors much less than themselves, who have ' 

 properly built their work on the foundations laid for them by 

 others. Yet to my view it is the bounden duty of every great 

 place of University education that they should keep before them 

 not merely the immediately practical needs of technical or other 

 education, but that they should never permit the ideal of Uni- 

 versity investigation to be for one moment clouded in their eyes, 

 or to lose interest, or cease to be the object of worthy effort 

 and endeavour. 



But that great object must increasingly, in my judgment, 

 require the generous and liberal co-operation of all classes of 

 the community, whether they be immediately interested in 

 science, intimately acquainted with scientific details, or whether 

 they be merely part of the general public. Men of science 

 themselves are not always in a position to give that pecuniary 

 aid necessary to establish the modern laboratory and to equip it 

 with modern appliances ; and they are right to call upon all those 

 who take any interest in their subjects to aid them with that 

 pecuniary assistance which in some other countries — many other 

 countries— is extended to them by the Government, but which 

 in this country, rightly or wrongly, by an almost immemorial 



