Makcu 21, 1912] 
constitutes by far the bulk of the work, being a tabula- | 
| education in ‘‘ Friendship’s Garland ”’ was highly so. 
tion of the numerical readings taken at successive 
dates throughout the year at the different stations. 
There are two “Annexes.” The first is a series 
of charts showing the disposition and extent of the 
various factories and works where hydraulic power 
is turned to account, and the second is a series of 
longitudinal sections, or profiles, of the watercourses 
of the Isére and the Arc. 
All are admirably prepared, and give rise to the 
reflection that some things are done much better | \ 
| The early Greek poets, like the authors of the Books 
abroad than they are at home. Our own country 
stands out in “splendid isolation” in possessing no 
hydrological service and in making no official attempt | = t 
| succeeded them expressed their thoughts in verse, and 
whatever to catalogue, define, and conserve her 
natural resources of water power and supply, now 
running to waste or liable to misappropriation. In 
this attitude she finds no sympathy or support from | 
her neighbour across the Channel, nor from the United 
States, nor Italy, nor Switzerland. Each of these 
countries has realised the advantages accruing to 
trade, agriculture, and the public welfare generally 
from a systematic development and control of La 
Houille Blanche. 
POETRY AND SCIENCE. 
PRE Professor of Poetry at the University of 
Oxford, Dr. T. Herbert Warren, President of 
Magdalen College, gave a public lecture on March 2 
on the subject of ‘“‘ Poetry and Science.’’ He began 
by quoting his predecessor Matthew Arnold, who 
wrote on New Year’s Day, 1882: ‘If I live to be 
eighty, I shall probably be the only person left in 
England who reads anything but newspapers and 
scientific publications.’’ f 
Has Matthew Arnold’s gloomy prophecy been ful- 
filled? Have newspapers and science killed real 
literature? In particular, are the interests of science 
hostile to the interests of literature? 
Where science has dominated, has _ poetry 
languished? This is a very burning question, for 
science has certainly made great advances. It 
impresses the man in the street, chiefly by its useful- | 
ness. It is the poet and the poetic person who are 
impressed by the marvel, the magic, and the mystery 
of science. Matthew Arnold inherited the tradition of 
Wordsworth, who was a great poet of Nature, but not 
a poet of Natural Science. He strove hard to do 
justice to it, both in his prose prefaces and in his 
poetry, but with imperfect success. _Wordsworth’s 
poem ‘* The Poet’s Epitaph ’’ contains a most beau- 
tiful and memorable description of the poet, but is 
scarcely fair to the man of science, who is generally 
a man also of natural affections. The man of science 
may be as fond of his mother as the poet, who is often 
one of the most selfish of beings, and if he would not 
“botanise upon his mother’s grave” because he 
knows no botany might be quite capable of turning 
her into copy. j 
Further, the poet is not ‘“‘contented to enjoy the 
things that others understand.’? He must synthesise 
in his own way. : 
philosophising and moralising. 
Keats, again, is often cited as complaining that 
Newton had destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by 
reducing it to prismatic colours, but Keats was per- 
haps not serious in this charge. 
Goethe, on the other hand, did not object to Newton 
for reducing the rainbow to prismatic colours, but only 
for doing so wrongly. 
Matthew Arnold ‘‘ poked fun ”’ at science as he did 
at religion, and was even less willing to treat it 
seriously than religion. He was often exceedingly 
NO. 2212, VOL. 89| 
Wordsworth himself was for ever | 
NATURE 
—4 
rire) 
amusing, and his famous description of a scientific 
Darwin, who began by being a great lover of 
poetry, thought that in later days he had lost the 
power through atrophy, but in point of fact the 
atrophy was by no means complete. He remained a 
most poetical writer. The closing paragraphs of the 
“ Origin of Species ’? were worthy of Lucretius, which 
they strongly resembled. 
History shows that poetry, philosophy, and science 
had all begun life together as children of one family. 
of Genesis and Job, dealt with the origin of things 
and the Story of Creation. The early thinkers who 
were often highly poetical. What could be more 
poetical than the “ dark ’’ science of Heraclitus? The 
same relation was maintained through Greek litera- 
ture. The greatest astronomer of antiquity, the in- 
ventor of the Ptolemaic system, was the author of a 
beautiful epigram which was truly poetic. From 
Greece and Alexandria, science and poetry passed 
together to Rome, and might be found combined in 
Lucretius and Virgil. The greatest singers of 
antiquity were the most alive to science. Modern 
literature shows the same phenomenon in Dante and 
in Milton and in Tennyson. This is specially well 
brought out in a book by a living man of science, Sir 
Norman Lockyer’s ‘‘ Tennyson as a Student of 
Nature.’? On the last of the three poets Sir Oliver 
Lodge has also written briefly, but with rare force, 
in the recent volume ‘‘ Tennyson and his Friends.”’ 
As time has gone on, the scientific spirit has in- 
creasingly made itself felt in poetry, and may be seen 
in the works of F. W. H. Myers and his brother, in 
the late Duke of Argyll, in George Romanes, in 
Richard Watson Dixon, and still better in his friend 
and editor, Mr. Robert Bridges. And others of the 
earlier poets had also been acquainted with science, 
notably Gray and Shelley. 
With regard to the greatest of all, if Bacon wrote 
Shakespeare it is odd that’ Bacon’s science does not 
appear more often in the plays, but in any case it 
may be remembered that Bacon wrote poetry of his 
own and had a place in the ‘‘ Golden Treasury.”’ 
Other lands and literatures too have had their scien- 
tific poets, the most famous being Goethe, of whom 
the best account is to be found in the popular lectures 
of a most poetical man of science, Helmholtz. I 
can speak at length only of one, the French poet 
of the last century, Sully Prudhomme, who combined 
science, philosophy, and poetry. The best account of 
him is to be found in the study by M. Zyromski. 
“ Poetry,” said Sully Prudhomme, “is not only the 
lyrical outburst of our sentiments. The great poetry 
‘has noble destinies, and will sing the conquests of 
science and the synthesis of thought.’’ 
The average man does not care for “ great poetry,” 
or only for that part of it which appeals directly to 
his own feelings. _Just now, what Sully Prudhomme 
calls lyrisme, that is, personal poetry, holds the field, 
but that has not always been so, and will not always 
be so. Science has not destroyed poetry. Cam- 
bridge, the University of Science, has been the 
University of Poetry, and with the revival of Science 
at Oxford in the last century, beginning in Shelley’s 
time, poetry revived too. The really great poet must 
respond to the main and moving interests and in- 
fluences of his day. The old facts and factors, the 
old motifs, do not change. Rebekah at the Well. 
David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan, Hector and 
Andromache, Catullus at his brother’s grave, still 
move us. But while these remain, our outlook on 
the world does gradually change, as Sully Prud- 
homme foretold in his fine sonnet to ‘* The Pcets of 
