J8 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 



I think of it rather as the continent which offers the richest opportunities 

 to those who woiild investigate racial problems in the true spirit of Science, 

 and so discover the solutions, which may yet enable that clash to be 

 averted and the threat which it implies to our civilisation to be dispelled. 



I have sought — briefly and all too inadequately — to indicate some 

 of the lines along which Africa seems to be able to make a distinctive 

 contribution to Science. It remains for me, yet more briefly, to speak 

 of Africa's challenge to Science, and to seek to answer the question, What 

 can Science give to Africa ? I shall not stop to emphasise the point, that 

 the greatness of Africa's potential contributions to Science, the key 

 which perhaps she holds to the riddle of human origins, the intriguing 

 vistas opened up in the study of her relationship with South America 

 and Australasia with its suggestion of past continental continuity, that 

 all these and more constitute a challenge to Science to actualise those 

 potentialities. Let me seek rather to define the two-fold challenge of 

 Africa in another way. Firstly, Africa defies Science to unravel her past. 

 Throughout history she has ever been the continent of mystery. She 

 was so to that pioneer of geographers, Herodotus, to whom nothing that 

 was told him about Africa was so improbable that he decUned to give it 

 credence. She was so to the Romans, who regarded Africa as the natural 

 home and source of what was strange and novel and unaccustomed. 

 She was so to the navigators who did so much to break down the barrier 

 wall between the Middle Ages and the Modern World. And though in 

 our day the geographical mysteries of Africa have in large measure been 

 solved, the work of the prober of her scientific secrets is only beginning. 

 Then, secondly, Africa challenges Science to define, to determine, and to 

 guide her future. If the great resources of this vast undeveloped conti- 

 nent are to be made available for humanity in our own and the succeeding 

 generations, Science must make it possible for the man of European race 

 to undertake that work of development, by showing him how to protect 

 himself, his stock, and his crops against disease, by enabling him to 

 conserve and utilise to the greatest extent the soils, the vegetation, and 

 the water supplies of the continent, by bringing to bear the resources of 

 modern engineering on the exploitation of its wealth, and not least by 

 determining the lines along which white and coloured races can best live 

 together in harmony and to their common advantage. 



That is the challenge of Africa to civilisation and to Science. It is 

 not now thrown out for the first time ; it is not the first time that it will 

 have been taken up. It is in Africa that the Greco-Roman civilisation 



