AuGusT 2, 1918] 
operation will be inestimable, can not be 
questioned. The great British National 
Physical Laboratory, which is the equiv- 
alent of our own Bureau of Standards, has 
been taken over from the Royal Society 
for government work alone.*7 In our own 
country among numerous organizations 
may be mentioned the expanding Engineer- 
ing Council, which now proposes an affilia- 
tion with all of the national engineering 
bodies and technical societies in the United 
States, thus bringing to physics and allied 
branches applications of unprecedented 
scope.2® Our Council of National Defense, 
together with the Bureau of Education and 
the States Relations Service of the Depart- 
ment of Agriculture have considered the 
mistakes of the Allies and have empha- 
sized the fact that the people now receiving 
any scientific training will have special ad- 
vantages after the war. As Dr. Claxton, 
Commissioner of Education, has said, 
When the war is over, whether within a few 
months or after many years, there will be demands 
upon this country for men and women of scientific 
knowledge, technical skill and general culture as 
have never before come to any country.29 
We must supply men and women famil- 
iar with fundamental science not only for 
our own development but to replace the 
hordes from European countries now going 
down on the fields of battle. 
Again, President Wilson has asked that 
the National Research Council be perpetu- 
ated ‘‘to stimulate research in the mathe- 
matical, physical and biological sciences.’’*° 
An Inventions Section as an agency within 
the General Staff of the War Department 
has been organized, and it is not without 
great import to the whole field of physics 
teaching that the Science and Research 
division is headed by Professor Millikan. 
27 Scientific American, October 20, 1917, p. 283. 
38 Scientific American, April 20, 1918, p. 355. 
29 Scientific American, September 1, 1917, p. 153. 
80 ScrENCE, May 24, 1918, p. 511. 
SCIENCE 
107 
Still another probable development, that 
can not but bring joy to the heart of every 
physicist, is the more or less universal 
adoption of the metric system with the re- 
adjustment succeeding the war. England 
has already admitted that Germany has 
gained in industrial efficiency by the use of 
this system.*? 
So many hundreds of young Englishmen have 
gone to somewhere in France that Englishmen have 
seen a great light in the simple workings of the 
decimal and metric systems. They are urging the 
abolition of the needless, brain-wasting multipli- 
cation of units at home.s2 
To date twenty-eight of the greatest 
public bodies in the United Kingdom have 
advocated the adoption of decimal systems 
of coinage, weights and measures. It can 
be no different in this country. We are 
now manufacturing some of our munitions 
of war to metric measurements, and surely 
this is a movement in which physics teach- 
ers should be the leaders. Knowing its 
value, they have advocated it in a half- 
hearted sort of a way for many years, but 
now, unbidden, comes a demand and an op- 
portunity. No single development could 
go further to establish in the mind of the 
public the idea that physics is a science of 
practical value—that its ways are the ways 
of efficiency. And hand in hand with this 
movement comes the proposal from Dr. 
Klotz for universal scientific symbols.** 
We have already gone further than was 
necessary to draw the conclusion of the 
whole argument. What has been said of 
physics is applicable in many ways to other 
branches of science. But the tacit assump- 
tion throughout has been that physics is 
one of the most if not the most basic of 
sciences. This may be a doctrine not uni- 
versally accepted, but we who advocate it 
31 Scientific American Supp., No. 2175, Septem- 
ber 8, 1917, p. 149. 
32 Elec. World, July 7, 1917, p. 3. 
33 Scientific American, December 8, 1917, p. 435. 
