408 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLVII. No. 1217 



are going to make an applied scientist in 

 the same field, he must still know the science 

 before he can have anything to apply. It 

 is not possible, at least it is not possible any 

 more, to make a rule-of-thumb chemist and 

 turn him out to practise what in his case 

 could only be a black art. 

 . You say that chemistry lends itself espe- 

 cially to this method of procedure, but it is 

 not different in this respect from the other 

 sciences. There is no greater truth in evi- 

 dence in all of the sciences than this, that 

 the men who are accomplishing things are 

 the men who have had the training in the 

 theoretical as their real preparation for the 

 practical ends which they are to accomplish. 

 The state universities were founded imme- 

 diately at the close of the Civil War almost 

 before the noise of battle had died away. It 

 is not strange that the provision was made 

 that attention should be given to military 

 instruction and so that sort of preparedness 

 has been going on through all the years 

 since. Nor am I belittling its value, for I 

 believe m it thoroughly, but in its relation 

 to the real preparedness of the country the 

 value of that work shrinks almost to the zero 

 point in comparison with the quiet, un- 

 demonstrative biit effective training in the 

 sciences that has been going on in these 

 same universities. We have heard not in- 

 frequently and indeed seen it demonstrated 

 that you can make a soldier and an army if 

 you have to in two years, but it takes 

 twenty years to make a scientist and there is 

 no fact that stands more clearly demon- 

 strated to-day than that for great emergen- 

 cies you must have a vast number of scien- 

 tifically trained men and there is not a little 

 satisfaction in the further fact that they 

 are equally good material to have around 

 either in peace or in war. 



If our own system of education in the sci- 

 ences and their close linking with the in- 

 dustries is not sufficiently convincing, 



turn for a moment to Great Britain. At the 

 opening of the war their eyes were sud- 

 denly and most distressingly opened to the 

 opposite aspect of the picture. They had 

 been sailing the seas and trading in goods 

 and had left the bulwark of their technical 

 industries, their men trained in the sciences, 

 altogether too largely to wear also the label, 

 ' ' made in Germany. ' ' This is not my criti- 

 cism. To the credit of the Britisher be it 

 said that when he sees the truth he is not 

 afraid to speak it. In this matter he has 

 been his own relentless critic. Read some 

 of his conclusions: H. E. Armstrong in an 

 address before the British Association, Au- 

 gust 1914 {Nature, 94, p. 213) refers to 

 Huxley, who in 1861 pronounced these 

 prophetic words : 



Physical science, its methods, its problems and 

 its difSculties will meet the poorest boy at every 

 turn and yet we educate him in such a manner that 

 he shall enter the world as ignorant of the exist- 

 ence of the methods and facts of science as the 

 day he was born. The modern world is full of 

 artillery, and we turn our children out to do battle 

 in it, equipped with the sword of an ancient gladi- 

 ator. Posterity will cry shame on us if we do not 

 remedy this deplorable state of things. Nay, if we 

 live twenty years longer, our own consciences will 

 cry shame on us. 



Professor Armstrong proceeds. 



Now after more than fifty years, not twenty 

 merely, we still go naked and unashamed of our 

 ignorances; seemingly there is no conscience within 

 us to cry shame on us. I have no hesitation in 

 saying that we have done but little through edu- 

 cation to remedy the conditions of public ignor- 

 ance which Huxley deplored. In point of fact he 

 altogether underrated the power of the forces of 

 ignorance and indifference; he failed to foresee 

 that these were likely to grow rather than fall into 

 abeyance. 



Sir Ronald Ross, in Nature for 1914, p. 

 366, says this : 



The war now raging will at least demonstrate 

 one thing to humanity — that in wars at least the 

 scientific attitude, the careful investigation of de- 

 tails, the preliminary preparation, and the well 



