454 
NATURE 
[JuLy 4, 1912 
MR. BALFOUR ON FRANCIS BACON. 
N June 27, Mr. Balfour unveiled the statue of 
Francis Bacon, which has been erected in 
South Square, Gray’s Inn, London. Before the 
actual ceremony of unveiling, a garden party was 
held in the gardens of Gray’s Inn, at which art, 
science, law, literature, politics, and other pro- 
fessions were represented, among the guests being 
Sir William Crookes, O.M., Lord Rayleigh, O.M., 
Sir William Ramsay, and Sir Henry Roscoe. 
_ The statue, which is the work of Mr. F. W. 
Pomeroy, A.R.A., is of bronze, and is erected on 
a pedestal of Portland stone. 
In his discourse Mr. Balfour first dealt with 
Bacon as a politician, and afterwards went on to 
describe his private character and to comment 
upon his work as a writer, historian, and philo- 
sopher. We reprint from The Times the portion 
of the address in which Mr. Balfour regarded 
Bacon as a man of science. 
What Bacon saw was the neglect of the scientific 
mind, engaged in verbal disputes, of the patient and 
childlike attitude of those who come to nature, not to 
impose upon nature their own ideas, but to learn 
from nature what it is that she has to teach us. 
Becon is never tired of telling us that the kingdom 
of nature, like the Kingdom of God, can only be 
entered by those who approach it in the spirit of a 
child. And there, surely, he was right. There, 
surely, he really did much to correct the almost inso- 
lent futility of those philosophers who thought they 
could impose upon nature the hasty generalisations 
which they had picked up partly from their crude 
observations, partly from their own imaginations. 
Many of his admirers speak as if his one claim to 
our gratitude was that if you examine nature im- 
partially you will be always making useful discoveries. 
You can vulgarise his view of science and of discovery 
if you will, but you do great injustice to Bacon if 
you take that view. It is true that he always, as 
he said, looked on the estate of man with pity, and 
to improve the estate of man in succeeding genera- 
tions was one of his great objects. As we are always 
talking of Social Reform, I presume that nobody will 
doubt that it was a great object. And surely that 
imagination which foresaw all that science could do 
for the estate of man was no imagination that crawled 
upon the ground, that could not look up to Heaven, 
could not see the magnificence of the prospect which 
was, as he believed, opening out to humanity. 
On the contrary, I should like to ask those more 
competent than myself to decide the question how 
soon this prophecy of Bacon really began to be accom- 
plished. Though dates’ cannot be fixed, I believe it 
will be found that it is relatively recently, say within 
the last three or four generations, that industry has 
really been the child of scientific discovery. Great 
scientific discoveries were made by Bacon’s contem- 
poraries, by his immediate successors, in every genera- 
tion which has followed, but the application of scien- 
tific principles to the augmentation of man’s power 
over nature is, I believe, relatively speaking, of quite 
recent growth. You may find examples here and 
there, but, broadly speaking, I would ask anybody to 
cast his eye over the history of discovery in such arts 
as those of medicine, in the general progress of indus- 
trial and agricultural discovery, and I believe he will 
come to the conclusion forced upon my mind, which 
is that the effect which science has had, and is now 
having, and in increasing measure is predestined to 
NO. 2227, VOL. 89] 
have, upon the course of this world, did not declare 
itself in unmistakable letters until a century and a 
half or two centuries had passed since the death of 
the great man whose name is associated with the 
philosophy of induction. 
You may say to me, ‘Well, all this is very fine, 
this prospect of Bacon looking over the Promised 
Land from Pisgah, but not entering therein (to quote 
the famous phrase of Cowley’s), but what has Bacon 
done for science?’’ I say that he did all that a great 
philosopher and a great writer as distinguished from 
an investigator can do. He created the atmosphere 
in which scientific discovery flourishes. If you look 
at the great men of science who were his contem- 
poraries; if you look at the estimate in which science 
was held, the fears of orthodoxy, the indifference of 
statesmen, the contempt of the multitude, you will see 
that no greater work can be done for science than 
to see this is one of the greatest tasks that lie before 
humanity ; and if humanity will only set itself to work 
in the true spirit to deal with that subject they cannot 
fail to reap a harvest worthy, and more than worthy, 
of their efforts. : 
FLORIS OSMOND. 
yee death of Floris Osmond at the little village 
of St. Leu about ten days ago ends the career 
of a very remarkable man, whose investigations 
and theories have furnished a solid foundation for 
our present knowledge of the structure and con- 
stitution of steel. The respectful sympathy of 
scientific metallurgists all the world over will go 
out to their French colleagues, particularly since 
Osmond died at the comparatively early age of 
sixty-three, when they might have hoped to profit 
for some time to come from the suggestions and 
inspirations of one who was an acknowledged 
leader in his field of work. 
Osmond began his metallurgical career in the 
great works of Denain and Anzin at the time when 
the manufacture of steel was being introduced; a 
little later he went to Le Creusot, where he met 
M. Werth, and finally he retired from the metal- 
lurgical industry, and devoted himself to scientific 
investigations in Paris in 1884. Some four or five 
years ago, following upon the death of his brilliant 
young collaborator Cartaud, and as a result of 
increasing deafness, Osmond retired from active 
work, and took up a quiet rural life at St. Leu, 
merely remaining in touch with his scientific 
friends and their work by the medium of an active 
correspondence. As a result of this voluntary 
isolation, Osmond was practically alone when he 
died, and the funeral of a man whose name is 
honoured wherever scientific metallurgy is known 
was attended only by the villagers who were his 
neighbours and six scientific friends from Paris. 
Osmond took up the microscopic study of metals 
seven years after Martens and twenty-one years 
after Sorby, yet to him is due the great impulse 
from which the modern science of metallography in 
its widest sense has sprung. Osmond’s most 
striking work was the discovery of the upper 
critical points of carbon steel and their explanation 
by that brilliant “allotropic theory ” around which 
controversy has raged so long. This theory in its 
a 
