SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 
The Debt to Science. 
By LORD MOULTON. 
F, with regard to the war, we ask ourselves “ What does it owe 
to science?” one is tempted to reply that in the first place 
it owes its very possibility to it. But for the stupendous 
advances that science had made in times within the memory 
of many, no catastrophe at once so wide-spreading and so 
deep-reaching could have happened. _ In scale and intensity 
alike, this war represents the results of accumulated scientific progress 
—it is the realization of all that which the accumulated powers with 
which science has endowed mankind can effect when used for destruction. 
We must be on our guard against treating the word science in such a 
connexion as though it included only the more recent advances that 
seience has made. Her old and her new gifts have alike been put under 
contribution. The development of the human race has been the result 
of its increase of knowledge of the world around us, of the properties 
of the substances that it contains, and the laws that govern them. 
Each such increase of knowledge has brought with it an increase of 
power. Man learns more fully the resources of the world in which ho 
lives, and what assistance he can procure for himself therefrom when he 
seeks to effect something which is beyond his unaided powers. ‘Thus, 
step by step, he has increased his capacities to an almost limitless 
extent. Gifted with only mediocre vision, the telescope enables him to 
see the almost immeasurably distant, and the microscope to. see the 
almost immeasurably small. In spite of his little strength, he can 
shatter in pieces the hardest rocks, and lift the most stupendous weights. 
Tf we would learn to what he can attain in speed, we must look to his 
skates, his cycles, his motors, and his aeroplanes. The whole world is 
not too big for his powers for communicating instantaneously with his 
fellow man, either by sign or speech. In short, although there is little 
ground for thinking that a man comes into the world endowed in any 
wise ‘differently from his ancestors of many thousand years ago, the 
accumulated gifts of science have opened out to the adult civilized mind 
of to-day the possibility of a life which covers a realm, and which is 
endowed with powers wholly transcending those for which nature framed 
him as an individual. 
It is to men thus endowed that this war has come with all its over- 
powering motives and wild stimulus, and to its service they have devoted 
all these acquired powers. To understand, therefore, what part 
science has played in the war, we must not only look at the specific new 
discoveries that have been made in connexion with it, but we must have 
regard also to the advances which had already begun to play their part 
in peace, and which under the stress of war had been pressed into its 
service. Indeed, we shall find that these have played at least an equal 
Re ene the great formative influences which made this war what it 
as been. : 
F 348 
