12 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, 
utilisation in industry of suitable inventions and to protect the 
national interest, and 
(2) To outline a course of procedure in respect of inventions arising 
out of State-aided or supported work which shall further 
these aims and be suitable for adoption by all Government 
Departments concerned. 
About forty patents have been taken out by the Department jointly 
with the inventors and other interested bodies, but of these, nine have 
subsequently been abandoned. At least five patents have been developed 
to such a stage as to be ready for immediate industrial application. 
It will be obvious from this short summary of the activities of the 
Department, based upon information kindly supplied to me by Sir 
Francis Ogilvie, that this great scheme of State-aided research has been 
conceived and is administered on broad and liberal lines. A consider- 
able number of valuable reports from its various boards and committees 
have already been published, and others are in the press, but it is, of 
course, much too soon to appreciate the full effects of their operations. 
But it can hardly be doubted that they are bound to exercise a profound 
influence upon industries which ultimately depend upon discovery and 
invention. The establishment of the Department marks an epoch in 
our history. No such comprehensive organisation for the application 
of science to national needs has ever been created by any other State. 
We may say we owe it directly to the Great War. Even from the 
evil of that great catastrophe there is some soul of goodness would we 
observingly distil it out. 
I turn now to a question of scientific interest which is attracting 
general attention at the present time. It is directly connected with 
Lord Kelvin’s address fifty years ago. 
The molecular theory of matter—a theory which in its crudest form 
has descended to us from the earliest times and which has been 
elaborated by varicus speculative thinkers through the intervening ages— 
hardly rested upon an experimental basis until within the memory of 
men still living. When Lord Kelvin spoke in 1871, the best-established 
development of the molecular hypothesis was exhibited in the kinetic 
theory of gases as worked out by Joule, Clausius, and Clerk-Maxwell. 
As he then said, no such comprehensive molecular theory had ever 
been even imagined before the nineteenth century. But, with the eye 
of faith, he clearly perceived that, definite and complete in its area as 
it was, it was ‘ but a well-drawn part of a great chart, in which all 
physical science will be represented with every property of matter 
shown in dynamical relation to the whole. The prospect we now have 
of an early completion of this chart is based on the assumption of atoms. 
But there can be no permanent satisfaction to the mind in explaining 
