May 5, 1923] 
_ members of his staff in order that they may advise 
him as to the cases in which the licences are being 
honestly sought for the purpose of conducting ex- 
' periments in wireless telegraphy, and on this advice 
he intends forthwith to act. It would, indeed, be 
exceedingly mischievous if the narrow construction 
sought to be placed on the language of the statute 
as it affects ‘‘ experimental licences” were to be 
accepted by the Postmaster-General. It is to be 
hoped that his expert advisers will deal with the 
question submitted to them in the light of the plain 
language of the Act of 1904 and in accordance with 
the well-known principles relating to the interpretation 
of the provisions of statutes which affect private 
rights. The expert advisers will, no doubt, bear in 
mind that in the case of any particular amateur the 
dominant reason prompting him to apply for a licence 
may well be, and often is, that he desires to conduct 
experiments, and, therefore, in his case as in that 
of the research student, the listening-in to broadcasting 
services is altogether a secondary consideration, 
although the existence of such services is possibly of 
some assistance to him in connexion with his experi- 
ments, and for this use he will, under the Postmaster- 
General’s proposal, be contributing his 5s. a year. 
_ The Postmaster-General made the further important 
announcement on April 19 that he proposed immediately 
to set up a committee consisting of members of Parlia- 
_ ment, expert members of his staff, a member of the 
British Radio Society, and a director or other official 
of the British Broadcasting Company, if possible, to 
consider the whole future of broadcasting. The 
_members of this committee have now been appointed 
and their names appear in another part of this issue. 
It is eminently desirable that a thorough inquiry 
should take place; in this way the various issues 
which have been raised can most satisfactorily be 
separated out, in order that each may be dealt with 
on a practical basis on its own merits. One of the 
_ most important of the questions upon which a sound 
decision is required is that relating to the position 
of the amateur worker in the wireless field: there are 
to-day thousands of young fellows who are induced 
to take up as a hobby some technical or scientific 
subject, owing almost entirely to the pleasure they 
~ derive in carrying out practical work with a view of ob- 
taining a clear understanding of some of the mysteries 
of Nature. It is desirable that the committee which 
the Postmaster-General has now appointed should make 
a definite pronouncement on this particular point : 
it cannot fail fully to recognise the importance of 
seeing that nothing is done unreasonably to hamper 
the activities of this particular class of workers in 
the wireless field ; indeed, it is likely to appreciate the 
NO. 2792, VOL. 111] 

NATURE 

591 
value of encouraging them, both with the view of 
benefiting science by their work and by their inventive 
faculty, should they possess any, as well as of assisting 
the industries of the country by the trade in the sale 
of the materials they may require for the purposes 
of their experiments. 
History teaches that there are certain directions in 
which an attempt to impose statutory restrictions 
prompts people alone to measures of evasion, and on 
so wholesale a scale as practically to paralyse the 
arm of the law: to mention but a single example, the 
legislature, with doubtful wisdom, endeavoured at 
the beginning of the eighteenth century to suppress 
the so-called “‘ Common-law Companies,” and passed 
the famous Bubble Act, 1718 (6 Geo. I. c. 18), with this 
object in view. The Act, as is well known, proved a 
dead letter and was, a century later, repealed; the 
legislature, finding that it must tolerate the joint-stock 
company, set accordingly to work to regulate what it 
could not suppress, and to-day the whole country is 
reaping benefit from the facilities which were created 
to permit the incorporation of commercial and in- 
dustrial undertakings. The present situation in 
relation to the amateur worker in the wireless field 
is almost identical with that which existed a couple of 
centuries ago in relation to the joint-stock company. 
It behoves those, then, who may be called upon to 
deal with the wireless licence problem to bear steadily 
in mind the teachings of history of the kind to which 
this allusion refers. 

Biology in Utopia. 
Men Like Gods. By H. G. Wells. Pp. vilit 304. 
(London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne: 
Cassell and Co., Ltd., 1923.) 7s. 6d. net. 
- ee columns of NATuRE are not the place to discuss 
the literary merits of Mr. Wells’s new book— 
although, for the matter of that, good style or artistic 
capacity and appreciation are qualities as natural as 
any others. Suffice it to say that he has achieved a 
Utopian tale which is not only interesting but also 
extremely readable. Most readable Utopias are in 
reality satires, such as “ Gulliver’s Travels,” and the 
no less immortal ‘“ Erewhon.” Mr. Wells has at- 
tempted the genuine or idealistic Utopia, after the 
example of Plato, Sir Thomas More, and William 
Morris ; and, by the ingenious idea of introducing not 
a solitary visitor from the present, but a whole party of 
visitors (including some entertaining and not-at-all- 
disguised portraits of various living personages) has 
provided a good story to vivify his reflections. 
However, since Mr. Wells is giving us not only a 
story, but his idea of what a properly-used human 
