THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 21 



but the education of man and society to pulse in the same rhythmic 

 wavelength or its harmonic. 



In some ways we are so obsessed with the delight and advantage 

 of discovery of new things that we have no proportionate regard for 

 the problems of arrangement and absorption of the things discovered. 

 We are like a contractor who has too many men bringing materials 

 on to the site, and not enough men to erect the buildings with them. 

 In other words, if a wise central direction were properly allocating 

 research workers to the greatest marginal advantage, it would make 

 some important transfers. There is not too much being devoted to 

 research in physics and chemistry, as modifying industry, but there 

 is too much relatively to the research upon the things they affect, 

 in physiology, psychology, economics, sociology. We have not begun 

 to secure an optimum balance. Additional financial resources should 

 be applied more to the biological and human sciences than to the 

 applied physical sciences, or possibly, if resources are limited, a 

 transfer ought to be made from one to the other. 



Apart from the superior tone sometimes adopted by ' pure 

 science ' towards its own applications, scientific snobbery extends to 

 poor relations. Many of the hard-boiled experimental scientists 

 in the older and so productive fields, look askance at the newer 

 borderline sciences of genetics, eugenics and human heredity, 

 psychology, education, and sociology, the terrain of so much serious 

 work but also the happy hunting ground of ' viewey ' cranks and 

 faddists. Here the academic soloist is still essential, and he has no 

 great context of concerted work into which to fit his own. But 

 unless progress is made in these fields which is comparable with the 

 golden ages of discovery in physics and chemistry, we are producing 

 progressively more problems for society than we are solving. A 

 committee of population experts has recently found that the expendi- 

 ture on the natural sciences is some eight to ten times greater than 

 that on social sciences. There is hardly any money at all available 

 for their programme of research into the immense and vital problems 

 of population in all its qualitative and quantitative bearings. An 

 attack all along the front from politics and education to genetics and 

 human heredity is long overdue. Leisure itself is an almost unex- 

 plored field scientifically. For we cannot depend wholly on a hit 

 and miss process of personal adaptation, great though this may be. 

 There must be optimal lines of change which are scientifically 

 determinable. We have seen in a few years that the human or social 

 temperament has a much wider range of tolerance than we had sup- 

 posed. We can take several popular examples . The reaction to altered 

 speed is prominent. In the Creevey Papers, it is recorded that the 

 Knowsley party accomplished 23 miles per hour on the railway, and 

 recorded it as ' frightful — impossible to divest yourself of the notion 



