496 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. 
the Director of the Natural History Museum, and the chief librarian, aré 
vested in the three chief principal trustees. This takes us back to the 
reign of William III. and the Cotton Library at Westminster. No doubt 
the then Archbishop, the then Lord Chancellor, and the then Speaker, both 
from propinquity and from their abilities and training, were quite the best 
men who could be found for this position of trust towards this library. 
Probably the present holders of these exalted positions—positions which 
they most worthily fill and which give two of them precedence after royalty 
in all Britain—are most fully endowed with the qualities which fit them to 
elect the senior staff for the library and for the collections of works of art 
and of antiquities at Bloomsbury. I doubt if the same eminent qualities 
enable them to deal equally satisfactorily with the higher posts in the 
Natural History Museum. If Parliament, or indeed any other body, were 
framing a scheme for the management of a great museum of science at the 
present time, I do not think it would occur to anyone that the holders of 
the exalted offices I have mentioned were specially fitted, either by the 
knowledge of the pressing scientific needs and problems of the moment or 
by their intimacy with the men of science of to-day, to be the most com- 
petent electoral body to choose keepers in geology, mineralogy, botany, 
and zoology. And, indeed, the existing arrangement has broken down. I 
do not know how long before Sir E. Ray Lankester’s resignation of the 
joint posts of Director and Keeper in Zoology in December 1907, it became 
known to the trustees that that resignation was imminent, but I do know 
that it was talked about and written about months before that date. Yet 
after the resignation took effect one whole year elapsed before the trustees 
appointed a Keeper in Zoology ; for twelve months there was no head of a 
department which contains collections unrivalled in the world. It took the 
trustees about six months longer to find a Director, and for about eighteen 
months the charge of this great museum of natural history was vested, 
under the trustees, in the Chief Librarian at Bloomsbury. 
As Professor Ronald Ross could testify, after scientific research has 
placed it within the power of man to exterminate so deadly a disease as 
malaria, the real fight begins; and the real fight is to persuade the 
authorities to adopt and enforce the measures which are offered them gratis. 
There is a case in point, if I am not misinformed, on this continent at the 
present time. It has been known since the time of the making of the 
St. Gothard Tunnel that lasting and often fatal disease is caused by a 
small intestinal worm, known as the tunnel-worm or hook-worm. Within 
the last few years Dr. Wardell Stiles has shown quite clearly that the 
unhappy condition of the ‘ poor whites ’ of the Southern United States is due 
largely to their being affected by this hook-worm. Their bodies and their 
intellects are arrested in their development, and the adults amongst them 
are unable to understand the prophylactic measures he advocates, but the 
children can be taught if the proper organisation existed for teaching them. 
Many of the Southern States are friendly to the movement, and I know 
of no greater service that the central Government of the United States 
could confer upon the inhabitants of these southern States, in which, as is 
well known, President Taft takes the deepest interest, than that of detailing 
Dr. Stiles for several months a year to organise and control this movement. 
If this could be done, I believe—and I am here speaking of those things that 
I do know—the United States Government would confer on their own people 
a benefit as great as they conferred on other nations when they freed 
Havana of yellow fever and Panama of malaria. 
In concluding this part of my address I wish to say as emphatically as 
I can that if science is to take its proper place in the polity of the nation 
we must endeavour to have men of scientific training, or at least of scientific 
sympathies, in the Government and also in the Government offices. 
I cannot recollect the name of one single Minister trained in natural or 
