FROM A 
 
 MODERN UNIVERSITY 
 Some Aims and Aspirations 
 
 of Science 
 
FROM A MODERN 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 SOME AIMS AND ASPIRATIONS 
 OF SCIENCE 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR SMITHELLS : 
 
 PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK 
 
 TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY 
 
 HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 1931 
 
(p 
 
TO 
 
 ARTHUR GREENHOW LUPTON 
 
 FIRST PRO-CHANCELLOR 
 
 OF 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS 
 
 406644 
 
P RE F AC E 
 
 THE essays included in this volume are a selection of 
 occasional addresses which have been given during the 
 last fifteen years on some of the topics that confront a 
 man of science engaged in a modern university. They 
 may be of interest in showing one aspect of the educa- 
 tional campaign that is being carried on in these newer 
 centres of learning. Like any collection of addresses, 
 this one may weary by its repetitions and reiterations ; 
 but on consideration it seemed better, and it has 
 certainly been easier, to reprint the essays individually 
 without alteration, than to attempt to combine them 
 into a more systematic treatise on science and educa- 
 tion. The concern of the author, it will be seen, has 
 been to raise his voice equally against pedantry and 
 Philistinism, the'Scylla and Charybdis through which 
 our Universities need to-day such careful steering. 
 
 A. S. 
 LEEDS, Jan. 1921. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1. THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 9 
 
 2. PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN . 25 
 
 3. THE RELATION OF UNIVERSITIES TO 
 
 TECHNICAL AND PROFESSIONAL 
 EDUCATION 40 
 
 4. SCIENCE AND THE PRESS .... 52 
 
 5. THE UNIVERSITY AND WOMEN'S WORK 66 
 
 6. THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN INDIAN 
 
 NATIONAL LIFE .... 79 
 
 7. GERMAN SCIENCE . . . .95 
 
The Modern University Movement' 
 
 IT has been said that the future historians of England will 
 record the foundation of its five new universities as the 
 most noteworthy incident that has marked the opening of the 
 twentieth century. The movement has been spoken of, in 
 a picturesque way, as the Northern Renaissance. I think that 
 we who have lived through this period may be inclined rather 
 to date the genesis of the universities in the nineteenth century, 
 and to reckon it among the great movements for emancipation 
 of people and liberalization of institutions, which will make 
 that century and the Victorian age for ever memorable. 
 
 The university colleges, out of which these new universities 
 have grown, seem to me to owe their origin not to anything 
 that can be properly called a Renaissance. University College, 
 London, and the Owens College, Manchester, were the first, 
 and I think there is the clearest evidence that their success 
 was determined, at the outset, by two factors; firstly, by their 
 providing higher education for those who were unable to sub- 
 scribe to the religious tests imposed by Oxford and Cambridge, 
 and secondly, by the liberal recognition which they gave to 
 natural science. At a later stage, they became distinguished 
 as the academic resorts of the poor in purse, and as the 
 nurseries of applied science. 
 
 What has happened at the beginning of the twentieth 
 century, has been the conferment on single colleges of the 
 power to grant those greatly overesteemed certificates of 
 knowledge known as degrees, which previously had to be 
 
 1 An address to the Leeds Arts Club, delivered November 10, 1906. 
 
io THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 
 
 acquired from some more or less independent examining 
 board. 1 It is true that this last step is a very imposing one ; 
 it has been taken with difficulty, it has aroused much interest, 
 and its consequences are considerable. But it has not altered 
 in any material way the aim or policy of the institutions con- 
 cerned, which, in some cases, would have become independent 
 universities much earlier, if certain predilections or prejudices 
 had not been insuperable. Their right and their need to call 
 themselves universities were challenged in high places and in 
 low. 
 
 This will lead us to ask the inevitable question what is 
 a university ? The question may be answered in two ways : 
 either by rhetoric, or by matter-of-fact illustration. For the 
 present I will keep to matter of fact ; later I may use some 
 rhetoric, but it shall be borrowed, and from a good source. 
 There are Oxford and Cambridge universities, Glasgow and 
 Edinburgh, Paris and Berlin, Harvard and Jonas G. Clark, 
 presenting among themselves many important and striking 
 differences. But the English idea of a university has been 
 based on Oxford and Cambridge. It is hardly possible to 
 exaggerate the influence which this prepossession has had, and 
 still has, on the attitude of Englishmen towards all university 
 questions. 
 
 To an Englishman, a university is something very old, very 
 venerable, very picturesque, very large, very select, very 
 detached, and, of course, very learned. Those who have had 
 to fight the cause of the new universities have found them- 
 selves between the upper and nether millstones which bound 
 this conception of a university. The highly educated English- 
 man, who as a rule has been at either Oxford or Cambridge, 
 
 1 The Victoria University was founded in 1880 and its degrees were 
 available for students of Owens College, from that date ; for students of 
 University College, Liverpool, after 1884; and for students of the York- 
 shire College, Leeds, after 1887. 
 
THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT n 
 
 is the upper millstone. He has been aghast at our newness, 
 our smallness, our poorness in this world's goods, our incon- 
 spicuousness, our ugly mundane surroundings, our incomplete- 
 ness in range of studies, our poverty in the number of learned 
 men, our poverty in halls of residence, our strange new studies 
 about leather, dyeing, and brewing. The nether millstone 
 has been the man who has not been at Oxford or Cambridge, 
 who does not believe in them, who associates them with 
 pedantry, ecclesiasticism, class education, idleness cultured or 
 uncultured, and who has doubts whether even knowledge of 
 leather, dyeing, and brewing, when acquired in a university, is 
 likely to be of much value in the work-a-day world. 
 
 Well, I understand both points of view, and I sympathize 
 heartily with both. It seems to me the most natural thing in 
 this world that we should have these difficulties to encounter. 
 But happily we have had in our founders a body of men 
 whom the public could trust, men who on the one hand 
 occupied in the world of business a position which was 
 a guarantee of their zeal and sagacity in practical affairs, and 
 who on the other hand were so obviously imbued with high 
 ideals of life, that they could never be suspected of a desire to 
 look upon higher education merely as an instrument for the 
 service of Mammon. 
 
 Here, in my opinion, do we find the main current of the 
 new university movement. It is characterized most of all by 
 this, that it embodies an attempt to infuse intellectual life into 
 the daily work of the modern world ; not merely to superadd 
 to work the means for a cultivated leisure, but to endow work 
 itself with something that will enter into its very life-blood. 
 
 The nineteenth century embraced a period of unparalleled 
 industrial development, and more remarkable to us than the 
 increase in volume of industry is the alteration in its character. 
 The arts of industry and commerce were transformed into 
 branches of applied science. Do not suppose that I mean to 
 
12 THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 
 
 imply that they are no longer arts, or that to call a man an 
 artist in his work is not still the highest term of praise. All I say 
 is, that the arts of industry and commerce have now a recogniz- 
 able scientific basis, and that no man can now be held to be 
 fully equipped for their pursuit unless he is familiar with the 
 sciences that underly and suffuse them. 
 
 We may look upon this from a utilitarian standpoint ; we 
 may instance the great fortunes that have been made by men 
 who have known how to turn science to practical account ; we 
 may point to industries which have prospered and industries 
 which have languished, in proportion to the attention which 
 has been given to their scientific basis. But we may look 
 upon it also in another way. If we believe in the dignity of 
 labour, if we wish to see in it something more than the earning 
 of a wage or the accumulation of a fortune, we shall seek to 
 ennoble it in every way we can, to shed upon it all the light 
 that science and learning can afford, and to ensure that it 
 shall be elevated by the delight which comes from the exercise 
 of a trained understanding. 
 
 Many things have contributed to the establishment of the 
 new universities. The most important that I Have not yet 
 mentioned has been the great growth of popular education, 
 the construction of that much talked of ladder which begins 
 in the elementary school. The towns have been producing an 
 ever-increasing number of young people who have had the 
 capacity, the training, and the inclination for higher study, and 
 who, from lack of means, have required that it should be 
 supplied at their door. The great demand for school teachers 
 has added incidentally to the urgency of this need. 
 
 It is, I think, easy to see how we have come into being. 
 The causes already named ; the existence of religious tests 
 at the old universities ; the tardy cultivation of natural 
 science there ; the great expansion of industries and their 
 interpenetration with science ; the growth of popular education 
 
THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 13 
 
 these are reasons enough, without supposing that there has 
 been a re-awakening of intellectual zeal or a resumption of 
 ancient studies such as characterized the Renaissance. Here, 
 at least, we are ; let us consider what we are and what we are 
 likely to become. 
 
 The new universities seem, indeed, very different from 
 Oxford and Cambridge, but I believe the difference is by no 
 means so great as many people suppose. The University of 
 Leeds or of Liverpool presents a very different picture from 
 that of Oxford or Cambridge, but the difference is more in the 
 frame than in the picture. Oxford or Cambridge is in reality, 
 as in the popular imagination, a vast university, with some- 
 thing of a town in its neighbourhood ; Leeds or Liverpool is 
 a vast town, with something of a university in its neighbour- 
 hood. In one case it is nearly all canvas, and in the other 
 nearly all frame. But it must be remembered that at one time 
 Oxford, at least, was no less important an English city than 
 Liverpool now is, and that in those days the intrusion of 
 a university was looked upon by the citizens not only with 
 coldness, but with violent disfavour. 
 
 I have no wish to make little of the difference between 
 the old universities and the new, but it is not uninteresting 
 to contemplate either the past or the future as well as the 
 present. As to the future, there are two possibilities to 
 consider. Suppose that something should occur to make 
 Oxford and Cambridge great centres of industry, to pollute 
 their air, foul their rivers, blight their trees and lawns, cover 
 their buildings with a film of tar and fill their streets with 
 crowds of artisans ! , They would become much like ourselves. 
 I do not think this likely. But there is the other possibility. 
 Suppose that something should occur to transform the con- 
 ditions of industry, that the extended use of gaseous fuel and 
 electricity should abolish our pall of smoke, that goodwill, 
 which is wanting, combined with good knowledge, which is 
 
J4 THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 
 
 not wanting, should cleanse our rivers, and that our religious 
 zeal should manifest itself not so much in an anxiety as to 
 what creeds our children are taught at school, but in an 
 irresistible endeavour to secure that these same children shall 
 be reared in homes and surroundings that provide at least the 
 common decencies, the cheaper privileges, and the simpler 
 joys of civilized life ! Then, I think, we should be surprised 
 to find how much we had grown to resemble a university 
 town. 
 
 This is a possibility that I do not think unlikely to be 
 realized. I think that it is not even remote, and thinking so, 
 the fundamental question about our new universities becomes 
 to me this is it well, in any case, that a university should lie 
 near the heart of industry, or should it be remote, secluded, 
 rural, far from the madding crowd ? 
 
 There is much to be said on both sides, and I am not 
 insensible to the eloquence with which pleas have been uttered 
 for the almost monastic seclusion of a university ; but so long 
 as great cities exist, I am wholly in favour of our universities 
 being by their side. To state the reason compels me again to 
 speak of Oxford and Cambridge, and I should like to take the 
 occasion to say how far it is from my desire to speak of those 
 great institutions with any lack of respect. It would ill 
 become me, for in the first place I was educated at neither, 
 and in the second I know how indebted the new universities 
 are to the Oxford and Cambridge men who have brought to 
 them aid and enlightenment that have guarded and guided their 
 infancy. 
 
 My belief in the wisdom of establishing universities in the 
 centres of industry is based on both experience and anticipation. 
 Experience has led me to think that English education and 
 English life have suffered to an almost incalculable extent by the 
 isolation of our ancient universities. The want of geographical 
 contact between the greatest seats of learning and the busy 
 
THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 15 
 
 hives of industry seems to me to have been attended by 
 mutual disadvantages, and to have placed in actual opposition 
 two spheres of human activity that in a well-regulated world 
 should be coincident. I do not think I over-state the case. 
 Broadly speaking, the old universities have been the training 
 ground of statesmen, lawyers, parsons, schoolmasters, and 
 doctors in a word, of the learned professions whilst they 
 have been to an almost negligible extent the training ground 
 of those who immediately direct and control the world of 
 commerce and industry. It cannot be surprising then that 
 there has come about something like an antagonism between 
 the conventional university man and the conventional man 
 of business, or if not an antagonism, then a marked want 
 of sympathy. This is not to be found to anything like 
 the same degree in Scotland or in Germany, where the 
 universities are among the people. I know it has been 
 maintained that a university cannot intellectualize its neigh- 
 bourhood. Newman uses these very words. They may be 
 true of a rural university, but surely they are not true of one 
 placed in a city, and especially of one in which the studies 
 bear closely on the surrounding industries. 
 
 One great misfortune of an isolated university is that its 
 government falls into the hands of a purely academic group 
 of men ; there is no chance of that association of men of 
 thought with men of action which produces a mutual sympathy 
 and understanding, and which checks the excesses to which 
 either class is prone. There can be no doubt that among 
 a great many men, not mere scoffers, but earnest, thoughtful 
 men, there has been a belief that to send a son to the university- 
 was not only of no direct intellectual advantage for the 
 purposes of what is called business, but that a young man 
 might thereby acquire a positive distaste for business, and 
 perhaps be diverted altogether from it. On the other hand it 
 can hardly be denied that there has been a feeling of repug- 
 
i6 THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 
 
 nance in the academic world towards those studies which are 
 most closely related to the practical arts. 
 
 Looking at universities merely as seats of learning, I can 
 see nothing but mutual advantage in their contact with great 
 towns, and I look confidently to this close association for the 
 destruction of a barrier that has been both artificial and 
 mischievous. 1 
 
 It may be thought, perhaps, that I have insisted too much 
 on the part which science has played, and is to play in our 
 new universities. I cannot deny that, in my opinion, science 
 has been their mainstay and that it will continue to be so for 
 some time to come. Nor do I deny that the sympathy and 
 support we have received have been based to a large extent 
 on the just belief that our work may minister to the success 
 of industry. But I am happy to say, and I say it most 
 emphatically, that if the sole purpose of our new universities 
 were to make industry and commerce more effective instru- 
 ments of either personal or national wealth, you might indeed 
 find men to staff them, but you would not find men 
 who were worthy of their hire, and you would have 
 nothing that had a just claim to the title of a university. 
 No, the sacred fire must burn, and the strength of our 
 position is that, as has been demonstrated over and over 
 again, it is the highest science, the most disinterested 
 study, which are the most productive even in the narrow 
 sense. We switch on our electric light, we speed along in our 
 electric trams, we flash our electric signals through space and 
 we bless the names of Edison, Marconi, and a host of other 
 
 1 At the same time I greatly deprecate the use of the term 'civic 
 university '. Universities should surely be cosmopolitan, and not parochial 
 undertakings, like waterworks, for the supply of a merely local need. It 
 is this attempt to play up to local patriotism which gives the new London 
 * Charlottenburg ' some excuse for arrogating to itself peculiar ' Imperial ' 
 functions. I am thankful to say that the University of Leeds is limited 
 neither in fact nor intention to the British Empire ! 
 
THE MODERN UNIVERSITY. MOVEMENT 17 
 
 inventors, to whom indeed all due honour be paid ; but we 
 are apt to forget that these men could never have been, had 
 there not preceded them some dreamer of dreams, some one 
 who cared for none of these things, some one who was more 
 of a poet than a practical man, a Faraday working in a cellar 
 with bits of wire and a compass needle, intent upon nothing 
 but deciphering some page in the great book of Nature. It is 
 only the ignorant, and among these many who pass for the 
 most learned, and are so in their narrow way it is only the 
 ignorant, who think that science is harsh, malodorous, mundane, 
 and unimaginative, and that we who follow it have strayed to 
 the worship of the golden calf. We cannot stock our 
 university with Faradays, nor should we wish to, but the 
 teaching of science there, be it but the science of making 
 soap if it is to be worth anything, even for a sordid end must 
 be imbued with a high intellectual spirit and informed by 
 a disinterested love of truth. 
 
 And there is another thing to be remembered. Set your 
 mind, if you will, upon teaching a useful science ; you cannot 
 do it usefully without teaching the related realms of knowledge. 
 Begin with chemistry, and you must have physics ; you 
 cannot have physics, but you must have mathematics. Nor 
 must science be inarticulate, nor yet insular ; the cultivation 
 of languages must accompany it. And then your students 
 have to be taught before you get them, you have their teachers 
 to train in all the liberal studies, and so arise literature, history, 
 philosophy. Your hospitals beget a school of medicine and 
 your courts a school of law. You cannot avoid becoming 
 broad, if you but do what is plainly asked of you. 
 
 I have no fear whatever of our becoming narrow in our 
 range of studies. In some thirty years we have passed from 
 the Yorkshire College of Science, with four professors, to the 
 University of Leeds, with thirty-two not because of any 
 sudden revolution, but from the natural growth of an institution 
 
i8 THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 
 
 founded, as the words go, ' in particular to provide instruction 
 in such sciences and arts as are applicable or ancillary to the 
 manufacturing, mining, engineering, and agricultural industries 
 of the County of York '. In the promotion of studies nothing 
 succeeds like success. Kindle the intellect at any point and 
 the fire will spread. You may be intent upon teaching science 
 that is 'ancillary to manufacturing industry', but as your 
 students grow there will be rebels who cry out for philosophy 
 and Greek, because their hunger takes that form. The 
 different tastes and aptitudes will assert themselves, and be 
 they ever so remote from those you had in view, you find 
 somehow that in gratifying them, you have added an intellectual 
 light whose rays will reach and illumine the quarters where 
 they were least expected. 
 
 I know of only one danger that may yet threaten our 
 university, and I am happy to say that I think it remote. If 
 any man, or body of men, should acquire the power to step 
 in among us and direct that our teaching should comprise 
 anything that partook of sectarianism, then indeed I should 
 despair. It is a proposal that might come in a fair and an 
 alluring form, but it is one which, in my opinion, should 
 be resisted at any cost whatever. I am sure I need not 
 enlarge upon this subject. I am sure I need not protest 
 that to take this view does not necessarily imply a disregard 
 of that third sphere of human activity to which I have so far 
 hardly alluded, I mean the sphere of moral activity. 
 
 This leads me to the last part of my subject. In many 
 ways the most anxious question connected with our new 
 universities is this what impress are they going to make on 
 the whole man, on the morals and character of our students ? 
 I am willing to concede that we here touch the most important 
 side of the whole question and face our greatest difficulties ; 
 but even here I am not the least disposed to repine. 
 
 No one who has the least knowledge of Oxford and 
 
THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 19 
 
 Cambridge in term time, and has had a glimpse of the life 
 that may be lived in those surroundings, can fail to understand 
 what is to be prized above all else in the ancient universities. 
 The beauty of the place, the noble buildings, the traditions 
 that they breathe, the great names of the past (and occasionally 
 of the present) that stir the imagination ; and then the daily 
 life, at work, at play, the meals in stately halls, the quaint 
 and ancient customs, the crowd of kindred spirits, the seeming 
 religious background to it all. I have lived as a temporary don 
 for a fortnight in a Cambridge college. It was not long, but 
 quite long enough to enable me to understand partly and 
 forgive wholly the exuberance of praise to which I have been 
 compelled to listen all my life from my many friends who were 
 educated at Oxford or Cambridge. I have been in Cambridge 
 in May week more than once and seen the very flower of 
 England's youth assembled there for wholesome pleasure - 
 making. There is, I believe, nothing like it to be seen in the 
 world, unless, of course, at Oxford. No one can wonder at the 
 impress such communities make upon those who dwell within 
 them, and no one can wonder at those who think that we 
 have nothing like this to offer and never can have. 
 
 But, after all, Oxford and Cambridge had a beginning and 
 so have we, and I for one am content to work for the future. 
 I should not be content unless I could do so with good and 
 well-founded hope. It is almost thirty years since I went as 
 a student to Owens College, Manchester, and lived in lodgings 
 in that great city. I cannot say that my sense of the beautiful 
 was much exalted by my surroundings, though I think my 
 sense of the need of beauty was very much sharpened. 
 There was good music to be heard, perhaps the best 
 in England ; there were good plays to be seen, and there 
 was some art ; but altogether it was not what is called an 
 * atmosphere '. There was something of a corporate life 
 outside the class rooms; there were games and societies, 
 
so THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 
 
 and I formed friendships that have been lasting and, 
 beyond words, precious to me. But I was conscious of 
 the great lack of the place, and I used to build castles in the 
 air as I thought of what might some day be. Well, thirty 
 years have elapsed, and I have often revisited my old haunts 
 with pleasure ; but the greatest pleasure I have experienced 
 has arisen from observation of the steady growth of those 
 elements of student life which were most lacking in my own 
 day. The change has been most marked and most salutary, 
 and I am happy to say that I have seen a not less satisfactory 
 change in the condition of things in Leeds. We have not 
 moved far, but we are moving, and I feel sure we shall move 
 with increasing speed. 
 
 We are at least industrious, and we are in earnest in our 
 studies ; we present few attractions and few opportunities for 
 loafers. We who teach, live under the public eye ; we are 
 kept informed of our not too great importance in the world ; 
 our absurdities are kept within bounds ; our extravagances are 
 sharply criticized ; our wise sayings, our sallies of wit, do not 
 convulse a whole community ; oddity does not give an 
 enviable distinction ; we are expected, we are, in fact, compelled 
 to take some interest in our fellow citizens ; we are called upon 
 to take our part, often a healthy subordinate part, in all kinds 
 of public movements ; we are constantly meeting people who 
 are our betters in everything except our own craft. We have, 
 oT course, some considerable disadvantages, for the time being 
 at least. We are deficient in the appurtenances for study and 
 research ; we are greatly distracted by the administrative calls 
 that attend the moulding of a new university ; we are not very 
 numerous, and we lack though personally I cannot make this 
 complaint the vitalizing intercourse with men of our own 
 crafts. Nevertheless, I will say for myself, and I am sure 
 I might say it for many of my colleagues, I would not 
 exchange my place for one in the university of Arcadia. 
 
THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 21 
 
 I regret most truly the ugliness of our surroundings, I regret 
 that the young people who come to us cannot breathe 
 unpolluted air, have their bumping races on the river, and 
 wander in the pleasant woods and meadows that should 
 surround Kirkstall Abbey. But we cannot have everything 
 at least at present. We have more than many people know 
 of, and shall get more than many people expect. 
 
 The question has been raised as to whether our non-collegiate 
 system of life (for our halls of residence are in their infancy), 
 the absence of the kind of supervision which prevails in 
 Oxford and Cambridge, and, above all, the proximity of 
 a large city, where vice in many garbs strides flaunting 
 through the streets whether these things do not bring to our 
 students risks that are vastly greater than those that attend 
 life in the older universities. I cannot pretend to say with 
 certainty. The new universities are of course mainly non- 
 resident in character, and must long continue to be so. There 
 is, however, a continual growth in the number of students 
 coming from a distance. In Manchester, two prosperous 
 residential halls, not very different in their regime from the 
 colleges of the old universities, are already in existence. We 
 have three smaller ones in Leeds, and I think there can be no 
 doubt that these halls will increase in number and eventually 
 contain a very large section of the student community, 
 including, be it said, those who are poor in this world's goods. 
 Of their importance there can be no doubt, and whilst we lack 
 them we are defective in what many people will consider 
 perhaps the most indispensable component of a university. 
 
 Meanwhile we suffer from the absence of what is of infinite 
 value, or what may be of infinite value, in making our 
 universities a training ground for character, and we .cannot 
 pretend that at present the impress made by three or four 
 years of our university life is in kind or degree all that we 
 could wish. Some merits in this respect we certainly have. 
 
22 THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 
 
 Our freedom from luxurious idlers is something for which we 
 may be profoundly thankful, the representation of all classes 
 of the community, of all sects, and of many nations, is, I think, 
 excellent, and the co-education of the sexes has acted most 
 advantageously on the morale of our community. 
 
 I have not the least reason to think that, as things stand, 
 the moral tone of the new universities will compare badly 
 with that which prevails in surroundings that would seem, at 
 first sight, to be so very much more favourable than our own. 
 
 With manners that is, with the -part of manners that 
 may be called art, it may be different. I am not one who 
 makes light of the graces of well-born men and women. 
 Who can be insusceptible to the charm of good breeding ? 
 Who will deny that there is some truth at least in the old 
 aphorism, ' manners maketh man ', in which manners and 
 morals are included under one term. Airs, affectations, 
 exclusiveness, frigidity, the cynic smile, these detestable 
 attributes of the snob who apes the gentleman, can be desired 
 for no one but good manners, they are something different. A 
 spurious kind of manners, a simulation of good breeding, is so 
 commonly the first warning of insincerity, that the real thing 
 has become suspected and undervalued, and some people 
 pride themselves on being blunt and bluff as a token of their 
 honesty. This is a distortion, excusable perhaps, but not to 
 be encouraged, and we must do what we can to add to our 
 cardinal virtues as much as possible of the graces of refinement 
 that give smoothness and sweetness to human intercourse. 
 
 Let us now ask again in conclusion What is a university ? 
 
 ' If I were asked to describe as briefly and popularly as 
 I could what a university was, I should draw my answer 
 from its ancient designation of a Studium Generale, or " School 
 of Universal Learning ". This description implies the assem- 
 blage of strangers from all parts in one spot from all parts ; 
 else, how will you find professors and students for every 
 
THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 23 
 
 department of knowledge? and in one spot ; else, how can 
 there be any school at all? Accordingly, in its simple and 
 rudimental form, it is a school of knowledge of every kind, 
 consisting of teachers and learners from every quarter. Many 
 things are requisite to complete and satisfy the idea embodied 
 in this description ; but such as this a university seems to be 
 in its essence, a place for the communication and circulation 
 of thought, by means of personal intercourse, through a wide 
 extent of country. ... A university is a place of concourse' 
 whither students come from every quarter for every kind of 
 knowledge. You cannot have the best of every kind every- 
 where ; you must go to some great city or emporium for it. 
 There you have all the choicest productions of nature and art 
 all together, which you find each in its own separate place 
 elsewhere. All the riches of the land and of the earth are' 
 carried up thither; there are the best markets, and there the best 
 workmen. It is the centre of trade, the supreme court of 
 fashion, the umpire of rival talents, and the standard of things 
 rare and precious. It is the place for seeing galleries of first- 
 rate pictures, and for hearing wonderful voices and performers 
 of transcendent skill. It is the place for great preachers, great 
 orators, great nobles, great statesmen. In the nature of things, 
 greatness and unity go together ; excellence implies a centre. 
 And such, for the fourth or fifth time, is a university ; I hope 
 I do not weary out the reader by repeating it. It is the place 
 to which a thousand schools make contributions ; in which 
 the intellect may safely range and speculate, sure to find its 
 equal in some antagonist activity, and its judge in the tribunal 
 of truth. It is a place where inquiry is pushed forward, and 
 discoveries verified and perfected, and rashness rendered 
 innocuous, and error exposed, by the collision of mind with 
 mind, and knowledge with knowledge. It is the place where 
 the professor becomes eloquent, and is a missionary and a 
 preacher, displaying his science in its most complete and most 
 
24 THE MODERN UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT 
 
 winning form, pouring it forth with the zeal of enthusiasm, 
 and lighting up his own love of- it in the breasts of his hearers. 
 It is the place where the catechist makes good his ground as 
 he goes, treading in the truth day by day into the ready 
 memory, and wedging and tightening it into the expanding 
 reason. It is a place which wins the admiration of the young 
 by its celebrity, kindles the affections of the middle-aged by 
 its beauty, and rivets the fidelity of the old by its associations. 
 It is a seat of wisdom, a light of the world, a minister of the 
 faith, an Alma Mater of the rising generation. It is this and 
 a great deal more, and demands a somewhat better head and 
 hand than mine to describe it well.' 
 
 Such in the splendid prose, which mirrors the purity and 
 nobility of his great soul, is Newman's best attempt to say 
 what a university should be. 
 
 Can our new universities ever be such ? I see them launched 
 in a distracted world amid much that is good and much that 
 is evil ; I feel now the fair wind and now the foul ; I have seen 
 at one time men stint themselves of money, time, and health, 
 to help us on our course, because they have thought we had 
 a great destiny; I have seen at another time a man with 
 money bags and transitory power asking an ardent professor 
 of history what he was doing for the trade of the district. 
 I have no claim to be a prophet, and I will only say that I for 
 one am content to work in hope. Every thinking man must 
 ask himself once at least if he is devoting his talent, however 
 small it may be, to the worthiest task that he can reach, and 
 he must decide as best he can. My only defensible claim for 
 speaking to you to-day on the subject I have chosen, is that 
 it is one to which from choice I devote the labour of my life, 
 and one which engages the whole of my enthusiasm. 
 
Professors and Practical 
 
 IT has been a fixed ambition of my life to play a worthy 
 part in adapting education to the needs of the busy world. 
 You will understand then though I cannot believe you will 
 understand fully how deeply I feel, and how much I prize, the 
 honour you have done me in placing me in the presidential chair 
 of a society that consists of men engaged in directing and execut- 
 ing the business of a large and important section of British indus- 
 try. My position arises, I know, from the circumstance that I 
 have taken part in the establishment of a memorial to that great 
 and noble man, George Livesey, who a short while ago was in 
 your ranks and whose former occupancy of this chair makes it 
 for ever a seat of honour. 
 
 I am sure that you will not expect from me more than is 
 reasonable. You know (as, happily, I do also) that any attempt 
 of mine to comment or generalize upon the great majority of 
 the questions that concern you, would only lead me to disaster. 
 Your work, I know, is full of anxious problems. The gas 
 industries are in a state of tumultuous development ; you do 
 not know what a day may bring forth in the way of changes, 
 great or small. Vigilance, enterprise, skill of all kinds are 
 called for with an insistence that ever increases. It would be 
 grateful to your ears to hear the voice of the true prophet, and to 
 have an unquestionable forecast of your future tasks. Astrology 
 and alchemy were, it is true, kindred pursuits, and it is said 
 that modern chemistry is approaching alchemy ; but I will not 
 take upon myself to cast your horoscope. 
 
 1 Presidential address to the Society of British Gas Industries, delivered 
 at Leeds on March 3, 1911. 
 
26 PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 
 
 My predecessors in this chair have, each in his turn, talked 
 to you of the subjects they have made their own ; and if I am 
 to come near to them at all, I shall be obliged to talk to you 
 on a subject which, so far as I can judge, everybody has made 
 his own. You can hardly meet the man who is not prepared 
 to talk about ' Education '. Even if he has had none, he is 
 ready to say how much (or how little) he has missed it, or 
 what it ought to have been if he had had it. It is often said 
 there is no bore like the educational bore. The other day a 
 very good friend of mine an admirable and humane man 
 told me roundly he hated the very word education. I can 
 well understand it ; but I bespeak your sympathy. If every 
 man you met who used or did not use coal gas was prepared 
 to offer you advice on the construction of a gasholder, you 
 would no doubt suggest, more or less directly, that he might 
 better mind his own business. But we whose business is 
 education cannot do likewise. We have to sit and listen, with 
 what patience we can summon, to every kind of public speaker 
 or writer who chooses to open the floodgates of his eloquence 
 upon us. But I suppose that if people only spoke in public 
 about what they had studied, the hush that would come upon 
 the world would be almost deathly. 
 
 I should like to put before you a few of the conclusions to 
 which I have come after occupying for a quarter of a century 
 a professorial chair in an institution which, in large measure, 
 was designed to subserve the educational requirements of 
 industry. At the risk of being thought egotistical, I will 
 explain in the first instance that my father was. a railway 
 manager, and that I consequently passed my early life in an 
 atmosphere of strenuous business, where, for mere amusement, 
 I learnt the construction and working of a locomotive, how to 
 manage a signal box, and did a number of other practical 
 things. My first chemical experience was, in fact, in the rather 
 odd work of analysing the fuel, oils, metals, paints, and other 
 
PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 27 
 
 things that pass in and out of the stores department of a rail- 
 way, while I was still quite ignorant of the science of chemistry. 
 During all this period, I was constantly associated with all 
 kinds of what are called practical men ; and the whole burden 
 of that experience was to impress me, when a boy, with the 
 belief that efficiency in the real business of the world bore no 
 perceptible relationship to the processes called education as 
 carried out in schools and colleges. Well-educated men 
 seemed to be men who were interested in reading books in 
 their leisure, or who talked in an interesting way about things 
 outside their business. Sometimes they appeared in the form 
 of mad inventors, whose futile designs were exposed with con- 
 siderable triumph by my father. 
 
 Now I believe this stage of development, or, rather, its 
 opinions, are those which, if they would but own it, a vast 
 proportion of the people of this country hold at the present 
 day ; and I myself believe that they are not wholly devoid of 
 foundation. It is undeniable that extraordinary practical 
 success is sometimes attainable, in both manufacture and com- 
 merce, by men who have had almost nothing of what is 
 conventionally called education ; and these men are the hardest 
 facts that we, who preach education, have to reckon with. But 
 I will return to this subject later. 
 
 In my own case, after the period I have referred to, I under- 
 went a long university training in this country and abroad, 
 and committed myself eagerly to the academic career which I 
 have since followed. The science of chemistry, as you are 
 well aware, has played an extraordinary part in the develop- 
 ment of industry during last century. There is hardly a branch 
 of manufacture that has been untouched by it ; but the most 
 conspicuous example has been the creation of the wonderful 
 industry based on the elaboration of the compounds contained 
 in coal tar. When I was a student in Germany, this industry 
 was in the full tide of development ; and I witnessed the 
 
28 PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 
 
 continuous flow of the most highly trained purely scientific 
 chemists from the universities to the works. I found likewise 
 that, in other industries to which chemistry is applicable, there 
 was a similar demand for scientific brains, and that in Germany 
 as a whole there was a well-established understanding between 
 science and industry very different from anything I knew of in 
 my own country. 
 
 You are no doubt familiar with all this ; you have heard it 
 before again and again. I repeat it in order to show you how 
 natural it is that English men of science, who have had 
 experience of the system of things in Germany, should be pro- 
 foundly impressed by its value to the nation. It is not 
 surprising that they should loudly proclaim its excellence and 
 commend it to their own countrymen. Yet it is very easy for 
 people who are imbued by an enthusiasm for something dis- 
 covered abroad, to forget two things first, that transplantation 
 is sometimes as difficult and as disastrous for political and 
 educational systems as it is for living things. And, again, we 
 are very apt in some circumstances to forget, or under-rate, the 
 excellencies of our own peculiar possessions. When we arq 
 among the snowy peaks of Switzerland, or in the lazy sunshine 
 of a southern sea, we may do scant justice to the quiet beauty 
 of an English landscape or to the invigorating spirit of our 
 stormy island shores. I am sure that, among the class to which 
 I belong, there is a danger of under- estimating the deep-seated 
 powers of Englishmen ; of neglecting the true genius of our 
 countrymen ; and, in short, of falling into a narrow-mindedness 
 which tends to put us out of sympathy with the people we 
 desire to serve. I think that no one who has studied the history 
 of our industrial development, or has moved observantly among 
 our industrial community, can have failed to be impressed by 
 the great native capacity of the Englishman for practical affairs. 
 The quality is one exceedingly difficult to define. It is very 
 elusive ; but it is there this power of doing things a power 
 
PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 29 
 
 compounded of energy, shrewdness, enterprise, determination, 
 sense of the fitness of things, and knowledge of the intuitive 
 kind. Who does not know the man who, somehow or other, 
 can get hold of the right thing ; knows a good thing when he 
 sees it ; has an unerring sense of a wrong thing ; knows when 
 and where to buy a thing, when and where to sell a thing 
 who, in short, does not know a good craftsman ; and where in 
 the world will you find a better than in England ? I honestly 
 believe nowhere. And yet it may be said that a man who 
 is this and no more than this, is but a serviceable savage. I 
 do not agree. He is a man who has developed one set of 
 faculties ; but it is a set by no means to be disparaged, by no 
 neglect to be allowed to rust. I honour the man in his work- 
 shop who can tell by the look, the feel, the sense of a thing, 
 what it is good for, as well as I can tell by the light of science 
 from the intellectual eminence of a university. For I know 
 that if he is really first-rate in his way, he can assess the value 
 of things for which my science has yet no touchstone. It will 
 be, I dare say, many a long day before an epicure can choose 
 his vintage by chemical analysis; it will certainly be long before 
 science can fully supplant the finely cultivated instinct of the 
 true practical man. 
 
 I trust, therefore, gentlemen, that if I, a mere man of science, 
 take upon myself to talk to you about education in relation to 
 your own pursuits, I do not neglect that vastly important 
 element of education, that development of mother wit, which 
 comes to man as he fulfils his appointed task of wrestling in 
 the world with men and things for his survival among the 
 fittest. I am not going to emulate the action of a learned 
 acquaintance of mine, who has recently taken upon himself to 
 lecture the pioneers of aviation, because they have not delayed 
 their heroic enterprise until the -mathematicians have discovered 
 the true theory of stability. Scientific men of this kind, if 
 they had their way, seem to me most likely to achieve the 
 
30 PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 
 
 true practice of stagnation. I do not bid you cease to lay 
 mains, to erect gasholders, or to make gas-fires, till we, in the 
 august seclusion of our learned halls, have worked out the 
 whole true science of heating and illumination. 
 
 But while conceding all this, we have to remember that it is 
 man's prerogative, and it should be his delight, to possess, to 
 use, and to extend the faculty of reason ; to increase his power 
 over the forces of Nature, and to constrain them to his service 
 by a deliberate, a carefully organized, and an unceasing culti- 
 vation of the human mind. 
 
 The true barbarian is the man who is content to do, and 
 does not want to know. And yet how many men are there 
 not, whom no one could call barbarians, who look upon our 
 organized system of education with a degree of distrust that 
 increases in intensity as their survey passes upwards from 
 the elementary school to the university? This, in my 
 judgement, is a most serious question of the day. 
 
 I have long held the opinion that education in England 
 is afflicted, from top to bottom, with an utterly exagge- 
 rated fear of what is called { useful knowledge '. In that fear 
 much of a vital kind has been left undone, and much 
 has been given in the name of education which helps 
 its possessor neither to truer wisdom, better work, nobler 
 conduct, nor to greater happiness. The world cries out for 
 educational bread, and it receives only too often an academic 
 stone. 
 
 I do not know that I am behind other men in the delight 
 I feel in abstract studies; and I can honestly say it is but 
 rarely I envy another man his larger share of loaves and fishes. 
 But knowledge gathered for what is sometimes called its own 
 sake, and treasured for its own sake, seems to me in great 
 danger of unwholesomeness, and a learned man who is merely 
 a man of erudition, as likely to prove a mischief as he is 
 certain to be a bore. 
 
PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 31 
 
 At the head of our educational system stand the universities. 
 A university is (or should be), in essence, a mine and a mart 
 for the highest learning. It was in its origin an adjunct 
 to those callings which made the greatest demand upon the 
 powers of thought. You may put it more picturesquely, no 
 doubt, but it suits my purpose best to use homely terms ; for 
 I believe too little stress has been placed upon the real 
 beginning, and the original purpose, of universities, as 
 institutions standing in direct relationship to definite callings. 
 It is, I believe, because our university system has not kept 
 pace with the great changes that have taken place in the 
 character of human occupations that universities have failed 
 to secure, or to retain, the sympathy of a large section of 
 the community. The great delay in the development of 
 research and of instruction in Natural Science in the univer- 
 sities led to a corresponding delay in the dissemination of 
 elementary scientific knowledge through our schools; and, in 
 consequence, we find to-da)' in the older generation of our 
 more educated citizens to say nothing of the less educated 
 ones a whole legion of men whose knowledge of science would 
 not correspond in terms of their grammar to knowing the 
 difference between a noun and an adjective, in their geography 
 the difference between latitude and longitude, and in their 
 Latin to that between Cicero and Caesar. Now I lay great 
 stress upon this lack of the general dissemination of scientific 
 knowledge, because people sometimes say to me that, after 
 all, we have surely had many distinguished men of science 
 in our universities for generations past. It is true. But they 
 were not preparing a market for their wares ; they were 
 elaborating in their seclusion something which was utterly 
 mysterious to the average man. Even to-day people come 
 occasionally into my laboratory with the air of men entering 
 a hall of mystery or a chamber of horrors, fearful of what 
 may befall them. Again, people say to me, surely the 
 
32 PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 
 
 industrial fruits of scientific knowledge have long been recog- 
 nized ? True again, most palpably true ; but how the fruit 
 is related to the knowledge, how the seed is sown, how it is 
 tended, what should be done to nurture the plant, that is not 
 known. It is not known because your educational system 
 did not achieve this one thing for the community it did not 
 put its victims for a single occasion in their lives in the 
 position of asking a simple scientific question, and of faithfully 
 finding the answer by experiment. 
 
 Now the portion of knowledge which most completely 
 and most vitally interpenetrates our manufactures is Natural 
 Science ; and it has been, I think, an incalculable disadvantage 
 that while these manufactures were advancing by leaps and 
 bounds during the century succeeding the industrial revolution 
 (which I suppose may be dated about 1760), there was no 
 movement in the educational world for a general dissemination 
 of scientific knowledge and skill. During this period, several 
 misconceptions took deep root in the English mind. The 
 achievements of Arkwright the barber, Hargreaves the weaver, 
 Crompton the farmer, Watt the instrument maker, Cartwright 
 the clergyman, Stephenson the fireman, Murdoch the mill- 
 wright, and of all that illustrious group their great and funda- 
 mental achievements created an overwhelming belief that the 
 self-taught inventor was destined to be the only important 
 pioneer in industrial discovery ; and to this day a young man 
 brought up on a diet of grammar and Samuel Smiles might 
 well despair of contributing anything of moment to the service 
 of industry, unless indeed he happened to be exceptionally 
 poor and to have attended no more showy a place of education 
 than a night school. 
 
 If the universities had set themselves to send a current of 
 science through our schools at the time when the direct utility 
 of scientific knowledge and of Scientific method was becoming 
 demonstrable in the industrial world, we should, I think, be 
 
PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 33 
 
 in a very different position to-day, and our universities would 
 hold a very different place in the esteem of our countrymen. 
 It is this historical retrospect, and the experience of the frantic 
 and wasteful struggles in my own lifetime on the part of the 
 worker to come to terms with the thinker, that have made 
 me realize the dangers that attend academic seclusion, and 
 have left me well content that my lot as a university teacher 
 is cast within earshot of the throb and hum of busy work- 
 shops. 
 
 Of all that we have lost in the course of the events I have 
 described, nothing is more difficult to retrieve than confidence 
 in the practical usefulness of university science. We are 
 suspected at every turn of trying to elude the practical man, 
 and to betake ourselves to studies, and impart information, 
 whose glory lies in their detachment from all things mundane 
 and remunerative. We' have engendered the suspicion that 
 we are intellectually exclusive, and that we do not understand 
 or sympathize with the practical point of view. A better 
 understanding between us is, I think, a matter of the greatest 
 national importance ; and it has seemed to me that if a better 
 understanding is to be obtained, it is incumbent on the 
 universities to go out as far as ever they can to meet the 
 legitimate claims of the industrial community, and to bring 
 their studies deliberately into the closest possible relationship 
 with the industrial arts. 
 
 I think I may claim that in this university we have shown 
 no lack of courage in doing so. In spite of a good deal of 
 academic apprehension and distrust (not always kindly 
 expressed) from outside critics, we have established depart- 
 ments of work for the explicit purpose of furthering the 
 special pursuits of industry, much in the same way and in 
 the same spirit as schools of law, medicine, and theology 
 were established in bygone days. Another thing on which 
 I would lay the greatest stress, is that we have secured in 
 
 2461 E 
 
34 PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 
 
 the direction of our university as a whole, and of these special 
 departments in particular, the active co-operation of men 
 of business and of representatives of the particular industries 
 concerned. 
 
 I do not look upon these steps as a gracious concession, still 
 less as a sordid opportunism. I believe that they secure the 
 best interests of thought as surely as I hope they will serve 
 the most immediate needs of work. 
 
 No one who has studied the history of science can be 
 ignorant of the fact that science has its roots and has gained 
 its greatest impulse in the practical avocations of mankind. 
 Chemistry was born in foundries and pharmacies, and nearly 
 every great advance can be traced to some industrial impulse. 
 I suppose the greatest achievements in chemistry were those 
 of Lavoisier. How did they arise? I believe I am not 
 wrong in saying that it was in the preparation of his prize 
 essay on the best mode of lighting the streets of Paris. 
 Beginning with a consideration of the best form of lamp, 
 the most effective form of reflector, the most suitable shape 
 of oil-container, Lavoisier passed to the study of combustion, 
 and, finding organic things like oil and tallow too complex 
 to reveal the fundamental nature of the process, he betook 
 himself to simpler things like phosphorus and zinc ; and so 
 he was led to the train of discoveries which constitute the 
 foundations of modern chemistry. * It was ', as M. le Chatelier 
 has said, ' this constant preoccupation with practical questions 
 that enabled Lavoisier to escape without effort from the fictions 
 and conventions amid which contemporary chemists were 
 merely marking-time/ 
 
 I have given you but one of innumerable examples to 
 illustrate a truth that we who profess science should never 
 be permitted to forget, and to assure you that I regard the 
 close association of universities with the .business world as 
 of enormous advantage to the universities. We have in this, 
 
PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 35 
 
 I believe, the true corrective of academic excesses, the best 
 stay for academic frailties ; and I believe the good understand- 
 ing and mutual respect which we may hope to bring about 
 between the leaders in the spheres of labour and of learning 
 will extend rapidly through the rank and file. 
 
 I hope you will find in what I have so far said, the evidence 
 of a desire to acknowledge some of the shortcomings of the 
 academic world. But I might well be suspected of having 
 had my head turned by the dignity you have conferred upon 
 me if I left you under the impression that I thought the 
 faults were wholly on one side. In what remains of the time 
 at my disposal, I wish to confide in you some of the difficulties 
 of the situation which arise from the other side. 
 
 I believe that a very large number of business men go 
 wrong, when they enter upon the consideration or criticism 
 of educational affairs, by attempting to apply methods and 
 standards and principles borrowed from their own callings, 
 which, however excellent in their proper place, do not apply 
 (or at least do not apply in the same way) to education. 
 Let me remind you in the very first place that you can, for 
 example, prepare no balance-sheet of a university. You 
 know how much money comes into the university chest and 
 how much is paid out ; but how much a university costs, 
 or how much it earns, no man can discover. Suppose, for 
 example, in my zeal to find employment for a student, I send 
 you a young chemist, who, by his unrestrained ardour or 
 incompetence, misleads you into all kinds of futile extravagance 
 surely you would debit that to the university ? I do not 
 doubt you would ; every care is taken that such things are 
 brought home to us ! Suppose, on the other hand, that I 
 send you some one, like a former student I met last week, 
 who, by what he had learned here, increased the output of 
 his employer's business by 33 per cent. Should this not be 
 credited to the university if by some one's indiscretion you 
 
36 PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 
 
 happened to hear of it ? I think so. In a business like 
 ours, it transcends the powers of any accountant to effect 
 an audit ; you would need a whole secret service of educated 
 spies. You, individually, may give us a thousand pounds 
 in the hope of a return ; but you, individually, may get 
 nothing in return at least in this world or you may get 
 a return that you cannot trace to its source. No ; the essence 
 of university finance is collective investment. It is to some 
 considerable extent selective for a locality, and may be made 
 equally so for a single group of interests or industries. But 
 looking at a university as a whole, it is national or even 
 international in its financial ramifications. 
 
 If I and many of my colleagues in this and other univer- 
 sities are of some value to this country, I would have you 
 remember that the cost of our education has, to a quite 
 considerable extent, fallen upon the German taxpayer. 
 
 If I say that the students who have gone from our Chemical 
 Department are collectively earning half a million a year for 
 the firms who employ them, no one can contradict me ; and 
 I am tempted to affirm it positively, as a counterblast to those 
 hasty financiers who look at our accounts and raise their 
 voice in lamentation over the capital we lay down, without 
 ever stopping to think of the unrecorded dividends that 
 accrue. 
 
 I will take another thing. I think a good business man, 
 while anxious to progress and branch out, while ready to 
 take risks and go somewhat afield for promising expedients 
 or appliances, is usually very careful not to lose sight of the 
 main current of his affairs expecting to profit by deliberate, 
 methodical plans rather than by totally unexpected accidents. 
 The same is doubtless true within the pursuit of science itself 
 where the object is simply to elucidate a given problem. 
 But when it comes to the contact between science and 
 industry, an entirely new factor appears. 
 
PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 37 
 
 The discovery of the atmospheric burner, was not an 
 accident. It arose from the desire of Bunsen to have a gas- 
 flame that would not smoke his flasks ; and it was contrived 
 by a stroke of genius. But what an accident for you that 
 a man of genius should want a smokeless flame ! When I 
 was a student in Bunsen's laboratory, there came to it Carl 
 Auer von Welsbach, in the spirit of.an unalloyed philosopher, 
 eager to solve some problems about the group of chemical 
 elements that seemed, of all, the most remote from any daily 
 human needs. He noticed the remarkable glow of the mixed 
 oxides when a flame impinged upon them. And so he begat 
 the gas-mantle. Again I say, no accident for him, but again 
 what an accident for you, that a man of genius should want to 
 investigate the mystery of rare earths ! 
 
 I need riot ask you where the gas industry would be to-day 
 without these windfalls from the tree of scientific knowledge, 
 whose branches, be it remembered, wave most vigorously in 
 the upper air. Instead of in this assembly of comfortable 
 gentlemen, enduring so kindly the garrulity of a professor, 
 you might perchance have been found in Trafalgar Square, 
 listening under the banner of the unemployed to more moving 
 eloquence. 
 
 By what definite planning are you to get discoveries of this 
 kind made ? The answer is, I think, by treasuring your men 
 of genius, and letting them work in the light of their genius. 
 Surely the time has gone by to wonder whether true scientific 
 work, carried on in the spirit of a philosopher, by a man of 
 genius with his feet upon the earth, subserves the material 
 needs of humanity. Who is there that will dare to set his 
 finger on any patch of new natural knowledge and say : ' This 
 may be edifying, but it is nothing to us ' ? 
 
 When, therefore, you seek to bring science into your service, 
 beware of unduly fettering the minds and discriminating the 
 topics. This seems to be the hardest lesson of all for the 
 
38 PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 
 
 Englishman to learn. His very straightforwardness and stern 
 common sense, and his businesslike ways, may all conspire to 
 make him unbusinesslike in matters of education and research, 
 to which, believe me, a man must serve a long apprenticeship 
 before he becomes a master craftsman. I will listen eagerly 
 to a business man while he tells me what he wants ; I will 
 eagerly seek the real knowledge that he has to give ; I will 
 eagerly lean upon him in the manifold business of administra- 
 tion ; I will eagerly take his money. But when he wants to 
 tell me that I shall teach this and not teach that ; that this is 
 useful, the other useless ; above all, when he talks as if a well- 
 constituted university should give proficiency in the practice 
 of trades and render apprenticeship superfluous well, I do not 
 listen to him very patiently, and I say to myself, ' Alas that 
 this man should think himself practical ! ' 
 
 If we on our side come to take a more sympathetic and 
 direct part in bringing science to your service, I plead that 
 you on yours shall show a larger measure of, faith, of hope, 
 and, I might almost say, of charity. Do not try to constrain us 
 in our own proper business ; do not be impatient of returns. 
 They are sure to come history has abundantly proved it ; 
 but you must freely cast your bread upon the waters. 
 
 I have chosen in this address to take what may be called 
 a materialistic view of education, and I am not ashamed. I 
 do not forget that education has many purposes to serve, and 
 that man does not live by bread alone. But without bread 
 man becomes a shadowy or a rebellious being ; an ascetic or 
 an anarchist. He must have bread, and he must get it by the 
 sweat of his brow. Englishmen collectively must have work ; 
 the nation must have industries ; and I take it as no degrada- 
 tion of education to contrive that it shall minister directly 
 to their preservation, their progress, and their prosperity. 
 Rather would I say this that thereby you dignify labour, 
 refresh the toiler with the fruits of knowledge, and infuse into 
 
PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 39 
 
 his daily work the delight of seeing beneath its grime and 
 dust a play of stupendous forces within majestic laws. 
 
 Of all the men whom I have known, I could point to no one 
 who more completely than George Livesey embodied the 
 finest native strength of the English industrialist. He was one 
 of those men to whom I referred at the beginning of this 
 address, who was bound to succeed independently of all that 
 we call formal education. But you know that he never 
 breathed any such vulgar boast. On the contrary, he believed 
 with all his heart in the worth of all things intellectual. He 
 was eager to draw to his aid all the resources of modern 
 science; he took the broadest, most sympathetic, view of 
 scientific research ; and I can, as I have said before, imagine 
 no memorial more acceptable to him than the one which to 
 our great honour you have set up in this university. 1 In the 
 inspiring address which he delivered to you from this chair 
 three years ago, he lifted your thoughts to the ethical side of 
 industrial life, and preached to you the chivalry which you 
 know he had practised in his life. Honest dealing, confidence 
 between man and man, care for the workman, national before 
 personal interests in short, a large-hearted humanity these 
 were his topics as they were his qualities. I am not without 
 hope that in the universities old and new, where knowledge 
 should be cultivated, whatever it may pertain to, in the 
 worship of truth, where young men should see visions, we 
 may help to maintain the fine flower of British industry, of 
 which George Livesey was so splendid an example. 
 
 1 The Livesey Professorship of Coal Gas and Fuel Industries. 
 
The Relation of Universities to 
 Technical and Professional Education 
 
 THE subject which I have the honour to bring before this 
 meeting raises certain large and fundamental questions of 
 university polity, which have been agitating many minds and 
 which deserve serious consideration, and I think it will be 
 more useful if, instead of attempting to give historical or 
 statistical information, I direct the attention of the Congress to 
 the broad considerations which affect the relation of universities 
 to what is now commonly understood as technical and pro- 
 fessional education. 
 
 In outline, the situation may be described in the following 
 way. Professions and business vocations are more and more 
 becoming learned callings, each developing a special body of 
 knowledge, which requires for its full mastery and effective use, 
 an intellectual training of what may be called the university 
 standard. The special training so required is, for what are known 
 as the learned professions and for some other callings, already 
 provided in universities. In the case of law, medicine, and 
 theology it has been provided from the earliest days of uni- 
 versities ; in engineering and agriculture it is comparatively 
 new : in commerce and chemical technologies it is hardly of 
 yesterday. 
 
 Outside the universities, the training and the intellectual 
 standards, which are deemed essential for certain callings, are 
 often regulated by associations of people representing the 
 particular interest concerned. This is, of course, still partly 
 the case with medicine, law, and theology. Associations of 
 
TECHNICAL AND PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION 41 
 
 the kind frequently set up the standards, enforce them by 
 examinations, but do not provide any training. Such, for 
 example, is the case in this country with the Institution of 
 Civil Engineers and the Institute of Chemistry. Further, we 
 must note the existence of a great variety of special training 
 schools with professional or technological aims, where 
 a portion or the whole of the work is of university standard, 
 but where there is no direct association with a university or with 
 an incorporated body representing a single interest. Lastly, 
 there are affiliation arrangements for the inclusion of technical 
 studies. 
 
 The next fact that I wish to emphasize is that the authorities 
 who govern these outside institutions and associations are, 
 to a large extent, men engaged in the particular calling con- 
 cerned, and are not primarily academic in their interests 
 and outlook. In some cases a municipality is the governing 
 body. It is to be expected that in any readjustment of 
 educational plans the existing governors will be tenacious of 
 the authority they have already acquired. 
 
 The question now is, What should be the attitude of the 
 universities in this complicated situation ? They do not 
 stand outside, they are already involved in it ; they cannot 
 refuse to be interested. It concerns especially those newer 
 universities which are still developing a fundamental policy. 
 
 The main difficulties of the position appear to me to be these. 
 On the one hand, it may be supposed that those who are 
 primarily interested in special studies, would be very glad to 
 secure for them the certain advantages which come from 
 incorporation in a university. They can hardly refuse to 
 acknowledge the benefit to all young men standing at the 
 threshold of their life-careers, of the humanizing life of a uni- 
 versity, with its great variety of individuals and interests, its 
 broadening influence on intellectual outlook, and its potent effect 
 in the formation of ideals and of character. They fear, however, 
 
 241 F 
 
42 THE RELATION OF UNIVERSITIES TO 
 
 lest the committal of their interests to the academic govern- 
 ment of a university might mean the loss of their own influence 
 and the sacrifice of a vital element of reality in the studies 
 themselves. 
 
 On the other hand, the universities cannot fail to recognize 
 the growth of new studies and new demands, differing in no 
 easily definable way from those they have already recognized 
 and met. Yet the number of these new studies and demands, 
 the particular character of some of them, and, above all, the 
 prospect of greater intrusion of the outside world in the 
 regulation of university studies, give cause for reflection, 
 hesitation, and, it may be, alarm. 
 
 I think there is no doubt -that amid much activity in the 
 institution and recognition of technical studies by our uni- 
 versities, there still lingers in many minds a doubt as to the 
 validity of the claim of applied science for a place beside more 
 ancient subjects. This doubt, when it exists among the 
 representatives of the traditional humanities, is not nearly so 
 serious an obstacle as when it is entertained by the votaries of 
 pure science ; for whilst the humanist will frankly avow his 
 dislike of these 'utilitarian' studies, the man of science may 
 declare his entire disbelief in u their utility, and claim that the 
 industrial arts are sufficiently served by the unpolluted streams 
 of pure science. A change of opinion is, however, taking place, 
 and the exclusive man of science is being forced to recognize 
 that there is a whole realm of specialized knowledge, lying 
 immediately outside his own domain and in close juxta- 
 position to the industrial arts, which may fitly engage the 
 highest intellects to explore, to extend, and to impart, and 
 which in every respect has earned its title to university 
 recognition. 
 
 In discussing the present situation, I think it will be best to 
 face at once the fundamental question : What constitutes the 
 fitness of a study for university recognition ? It is a question 
 
TECHNICAL AND PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION 43 
 
 not often publicly discussed, but it constantly comes before those 
 who are concerned with the organization and management of 
 higher education, and there is no doubt that it gives rise to 
 a good deal of strong feeling. We are constantly thrown back 
 upon a consideration of the legitimate functions of a university. 
 
 On this subject much has been said and much may be said ; 
 but if we desire to be brief and summary, I do not think we 
 shall easily find a better declaration than is contained in words 
 used by our Chairman. Speaking of a university, he says, 
 * A fourfold duty lies upon it : to provide the best teaching 
 over the entire field of knowledge of which its own resources and 
 the progress of science may admit ; to offer this teaching to 
 the widest range of students ; to mould and shape them not 
 merely by the training of intellect, but by the discipline of 
 spirit, so that, wherever they go, they may be worthy citizens or 
 worthy servants of the State ; and to extend by original in- 
 quiry the frontiers of learning.' (University Reform, Lord 
 Curzon of Kedleston, 1909, p. 210.) 
 
 These words are used expressly in relation to * a university 
 so historical in its character and so majestic in its influence ' 
 as Oxford. But I think we shall say that they define the 
 proper functions of every university, and that any corporation 
 styling itself a university, which does not mean to abide by 
 every one of these articles of faith, is guilty of taking a name 
 in vain. The newer universities, so far as I know them, are 
 just as ambitious, and just as high-principled as the old ; and 
 they would scorn with equal fervour the worship of false gods. 
 They are, it is true, young, and for the most part small and 
 greatly lacking in amenities ; yet universities they are, and 
 each one of them hopes, I imagine, under the blessing of 
 Providence, to become in good time a mighty instrument of 
 wisdom and enlightenment. 
 
 It is therefore no solution of the question of the fitness of 
 doubtful studies for university recognition, to suggest that 
 
44 THE RELATION OF UNIVERSITIES TO 
 
 they may be relegated to the young institutions, if this sug- 
 gestion is made, as I am afraid is sometimes the case, from 
 a feeling that these places after all have not much of a char- 
 acter to keep up. On the contrary, if certain studies are 
 essentially alien to the purpose, or derogatory to the dignity 
 of a university, they should be excluded with especial rigour 
 from universities that are handicapped by the frailties of 
 youth. 
 
 Only one thing could be worse to propose a segregation of 
 these doubtful studies altogether, because they are doubtful ; 
 to put them upon the suffrages of the Philistine ; and to let them 
 proclaim their money-worth in the market-place, to all who 
 are eager only for what they conceive to be the utilities of 
 knowledge. 
 
 What is it that lies behind this suspicion of the studies that 
 are in question ? It is undoubtedly the belief that they are in 
 their nature mercenary ; mercenary because they are meant 
 for direct application to the occupations of life. It is, in fact, 
 the old, old question of bread-and-butter studies. Narrow, 
 pedantic, and mischievous as, I think, is the spirit often 
 associated with this jibe, I respect the apprehension that 
 underlies it; and if I believed that the embodiment of techno- 
 logical and professional studies would depress either the 
 intellectual or ethical standards of university life, I should, 
 I hope, never raise my voice in favour of such a policy. 
 
 We treasure, and justly treasure, the ideal of a university 
 which, in the past, has been appraised again and again in the 
 finest and sincerest eloquence of our worthiest men. I hardly 
 know how to follow their words with any language of dissent 
 that will not seem impertinent ; yet I must confess to never 
 having felt the justice of praise bestowed upon the feature of 
 detachment, which in the past has been so characteristic, especi- 
 ally, of English universities. I am, of course, aware of the force 
 of certain influences which are specially favoured by seclusion 
 
TECHNICAL AND PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION 45 
 
 from the world, just as I am aware of the dangers which beset any 
 individual or institution that becomes embroiled in the strenuous 
 life of our feverish Western nations at the present day. But 
 I do not think that any thoughtful person who has spent his 
 years, say, in the North of England, can have failed to dis- 
 cover and deplore the great lack of sympathy and good 
 understanding between the educational and industrial com- 
 munities, and to seek for the cause of this estrangement. I can 
 only give my own explanation. I do not believe that the 
 cause lies in the turpitude of the industrial world. I have no 
 sympathy with those people who can see in the industrial life 
 nothing but a sordid struggle for worldly success and wealth. It 
 is a distorted and an unfair view. The amassing of money is no 
 doubt an inevitable incident and the readiest measure of 
 success in industry. Truly enough, it is a consuming purpose 
 with multitudes who are under the stress of hard necessity. 
 But exactly the same is true of the learned professions. There 
 may be more sordid souls among the leaders of industry than 
 in the professional world I express no opinion but as well 
 in industry as there, the achievement, and, to all right minds, 
 the glory of success, come from the conquest of difficulties ; it 
 is this same zest to do right things well, and it is not cupidity, 
 which is the sustaining force of our manufacturing world. 
 Such at least has been my observation. 
 
 The fault, I believe, has lain rather with the educational 
 world. It should have led, where it has tardily followed. If 
 educational institutions are to preserve their influence on the 
 people, they must alter their ways with the progress of civiliza- 
 tion, in some measure, as the people alter theirs ; they must be 
 ever alert not to get detached. But how difficult it is ! At one 
 time mankind inaugurates a system well adapted, it may be, 
 to the conditions of the time. The system becomes dear to 
 its generation ; people who have profited from it proclaim its 
 excellence, recommend and enforce its claims upon their con- 
 
46 THE RELATION OF UNIVERSITIES TO 
 
 temporaries and their successors. As years roll on it acquires 
 the added graces of antiquity and becomes something almost 
 sacred, something that would be profaned by change ; until at 
 last it is found to be standing hopelessly apart from the 
 human needs it was intended to subserve. For happily 
 humanity itself is progressive ; change, unceasing change, is 
 the law of progress, and what fitted the conditions of life 
 a century ago cannot be expected to fit them equally to-day. 
 These remarks apply, I believe, with full force to education, 
 and it is surely incumbent on us to be continually asking 
 whether our educational system is in conformity with the con- 
 ditions and legitimate needs of the day. 
 
 The universities stand at the head of our educational 
 system, and from them flows the intellectual streams to 
 irrigate the plains where men do their varied tasks. It is at 
 the universities that all types of education should receive their 
 sanction and their inspiration. It is not for universities to 
 fold their arms and say, l fy suis,fy reste\ and to look with- 
 disdain upon the efforts of the multitude to get for themselves 
 through the zealous aid of Government officials, municipal 
 authorities, and men of business, something adapted to their 
 new intellectual needs and appetites something they cannot 
 find in the rigid articles of their educational hierarchy. If 
 the universities do this, they may, indeed, preserve a splendid 
 isolation and do great things in many ways, which it is my 
 last wish to belittle ; but they will leave undone what is 
 essential if they are to exert their proper influence, and if the 
 balance of life is to be preserved between thought and action ; 
 and they will continue to divert from industry intellectual 
 talent that is born in it, and that would go back to strengthen, 
 enlighten, and ennoble it if the talent were well directed, and 
 if it found that in the high courts of learning even techno- 
 logies had an honourable place. 
 
 The isolation of professional or technological studies, and 
 
TECHNICAL AND PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION 47 
 
 their cultivation in separate institutions, seems to me to be 
 fraught with serious dangers and disadvantages. In the first 
 place, countenance is given to the mischievous tendency to 
 distinguish between useful and useless knowledge. An 
 entirely artificial cleavage is produced in the whole body of 
 learning, which prevents that reaction between teachers, 
 students, and studies of different types that is so potent in 
 correcting extravagances, in extending the mental horizon, in 
 producing breadth of intellectual sympathy, and in giving 
 a well-adjusted culture to the whole human being. It would, 
 I think, be difficult to overstate the importance of the influence 
 which comes from the close association, in a place of learning, 
 of people of widely different interests and destinies. It means 
 more than one can well say. It is at the basis of what we call 
 liberalism in education ; it is the thing which works equally 
 against pedantry and venality ; it is more than intellectual, it 
 is spiritual. It is, I believe, all-important and indispensable if 
 we desire to imbue the rising generation with the true per- 
 spective of knowledge and of life. 
 
 I am well aware that the cultivation of technical and pro- 
 fessional studies in separate institutions is favoured by some 
 high authorities and is the accepted practice of some countries. 
 I can well believe that it has some advantages of convenience 
 and may conduce to a certain kind of efficiency. Efficiency 
 we certainly desire ; the close union of specialized knowledge 
 with the practical arts is now a necessity of national existence. 
 But national well-being depends in the end on something much 
 deeper than intellectual efficiency and technical skill. -We 
 want first and foremost men of character, understanding, and 
 ideals, and in the organization of technical and professional 
 training, as in all educational enterprise, this is a primary 
 consideration to which sacrifices may be cheerfully made. 
 
 For these reasons then, positive and negative, I am an 
 earnest advocate for the actual embodiment of professional and 
 
48 THE RELATION OF UNIVERSITIES TO 
 
 technical studies in our universities. It is there that they will 
 find not only abundant springs of intellectual nourishment, but 
 also the influences that will keep them expansive and whole- 
 some. It is there that they will bring a much-needed bond 
 with a vast section of the working world, and help to keep in 
 check extravagances which are the opposite of their own. 
 
 It is, of course, not suggested that each university should 
 attempt to cope with the whole range of professional and 
 technical studies. Among them they may cover the whole 
 field, tach university addressing itself to the particular studies 
 which local or other conditions determine as appropriate. This 
 division of labour, accompanied by freedom of interchange of 
 students between universities, would greatly promote both 
 economy and efficiency, and would prevent any undesirable 
 predominance of technical and professional studies in a single 
 institution. 
 
 The policy which I have advocated in this paper has been 
 fully embraced by the university with which I am con- 
 nected, and, in conclusion, it may be of interest if I refer to 
 some questions of detail in connexion with it, which have 
 forced themselves on my attention. 
 
 I have alluded in an earlier part of this paper to the existence 
 of a number of associations representative of various profes- 
 sions and industries, which have among their objects the 
 regulation of the training and the intellectual standards which 
 are deemed essential for their several callings. It seems highly 
 desirable that the interest and the experience of such associa- 
 tions should be brought in to aid the universities in the 
 organization and control of those departments which are 
 concerned with technical studies. There seems no more reason, 
 for example, why, in a subject like Engineering, the organized 
 bodies of the profession should not participate just as much in 
 the regulation of university studies of that subject as the medical 
 profession does in effect in the study of medicine. And the 
 
TECHNICAL AND PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION 49 
 
 same thing applies generally to organized bodies, which are 
 deeply concerned in the education that is preparatory to the 
 calling that they represent. This idea has, I believe, only been 
 realized to a very small extent ; but in some of the newer 
 universities great importance is attached to the co-operation 
 in the administration of departments of applied science, of 
 Advisory Committees, consisting of men for the most part 
 actively engaged in the industry to which the applied science 
 is related. At least one case may be quoted where such an 
 Advisory Committee is composed mainly of representatives 
 directly delegated from the professional associations repre- 
 sentative of the whole industry concerned. The gain to the 
 university of such relationship is very great. Not only does it 
 bring with it a large amount of valuable advice to the service 
 of the university, but it breaks down the barriers which are 
 so apt to arise between academic and practical life, and ensures 
 that there shall be a vitalizing contact between the university 
 and the world outside. The extraordinarily rapid transforma- 
 tions which industries undergo at the present day, lead to the 
 danger of a teacher becoming out of touch with current 
 developments and new needs, if he is isolated within the 
 precincts of a university. His intercourse with industrial 
 leaders is greatly facilitated by the existence of such Advisory 
 Committees as I have referred to. The limits of the authority 
 of such Committees will, of course, be regulated by the uni- 
 versity, and care will be taken that their intervention does 
 not proceed beyond due limits. They should be, in academic 
 matters, as their name implies, rather advisory than executive. 
 The difficulty of securing suitable teachers of applied science 
 is no doubt very considerable. Whilst it is essential that such 
 a teacher should have a first-hand knowledge and experience 
 of the industry towards which his teaching is to be directed ; 
 and whilst he should keep in mind industrial needs and in- 
 dustrial demands, and maintain a sympathetic interest in the 
 
 2461 G 
 
50 THE RELATION OF UNIVERSITIES TO 
 
 point of view of the man who is limited on every side by industrial 
 and commercial conditions, it is no less essential that he should 
 be as much an enthusiastic lover of knowledge and an eager 
 seeker of new truth as any other teacher. The qualifications 
 of an ideal university teacher of applied science are, indeed, more 
 complex than those of any other class ; and having regard to the 
 temptations by which such a man is beset to commit himself 
 wholly to an industrial career, it must be regarded as a stroke of 
 good fortune when he is secured to a university. But when 
 the right teacher is found, he may be trusted to maintain the 
 intellectual prestige of his subject, to keep it in every way 
 worthy of its place in the university, and to be scrupulous in 
 regard to his own professional relations with the calling in 
 which he is an expert. 
 
 The creation of faculties within a university seems to be 
 almost inevitable for various purposes of administration, but it 
 is well known to be attended by certain risks. There is a 
 tendency in the deliberations of a faculty, for questions to be 
 viewed too much from a single standpoint, and it is not easy, 
 when a united opinion has been formed in this way, to avoid 
 a certain amount of friction when the same question intimately 
 concerns two separate faculties. For such reasons there is much 
 to be said for maintaining applied science in close association 
 with pure science. A fusion of the two faculties for all delibera- 
 tive purposes has seemed, in my own experience, to be of the 
 utmost advantage. 
 
 With regard to the question of degrees embodying applied 
 science and the curricula related thereto, there is no doubt 
 a good deal of difference of opinion. I*am, for my own part, 
 strongly averse to the multiplication of degrees, and cannot 
 help regretting that so much differentiation has already taken 
 place. It seems much more important that a degree should 
 mark a state of maturity rather than a special kind of pro- 
 ficiency, and I have a fear that great variety in the names of 
 
TECHNICAL AND PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION 51 
 
 degrees will lead to much public confusion. I can see no 
 objection to giving a qualified student of applied science a degree 
 in science without further modification of the title. But the 
 matter is, perhaps, of no very great importance. 
 
 With regard to curricula, the introduction of applied 
 science creates some difficulty, owing to the number of contri- 
 butory studies which claim a place, and the reluctance which 
 every teacher naturally feels to see his own subject either 
 excluded or reduced in range. It is, however, an inevitable 
 consequence of the growth of knowledge and the rise of new 
 studies of all kinds, that some sacrifice of the old must be 
 made, that the range of preparatory studies must be restricted, 
 and that they must be reduced more to their philosophical 
 essentials. It is, however, a great mistake to suppose that 
 the disciplinary element and intellectual depth of scientific 
 knowledge are reduced when we pass from pure to applied 
 science, or that a curriculum which extends over three or four 
 years and includes a large measure of applied science, stands 
 in any but the most pedantic sense ' below ' any other uni- 
 versity curriculum of equal length, 
 
 It is no doubt justly held that the besetting danger of 
 specialized education of all kinds is the neglect of preparatory 
 studies and fundamental sciences, without which, technical 
 knowledge, however elaborate, is inanimate and sterile. It is 
 here that what may be called the academic weight of a uni- 
 versity affords a safeguard that can hardly be overvalued. 
 
 There are many other questions of importance which arise 
 in connexion with the subject of this paper, and I am well 
 aware that my treatment of it has been meagre and incom- 
 plete : but I have been intent mainly upon the advocacy of 
 a general policy, and I have no doubt that those who follow 
 me in the discussion will bring forward questions which I have 
 omitted, and on which, from their own special experience, 
 they can speak with much greater authority. 
 
Science and the Press 1 
 
 EVER since I read the newspaper account of my first public 
 scientific lecture I have looked forward to an opportunity 
 of addressing journalists on the subject of science and the 
 Press. Now that the opportunity has come, I find that time 
 and experience have so mellowed my feelings as to rob the 
 occasion of the dramatic interest that it at one time seemed to 
 promise, and if I do not come to praise, I have at least no 
 longer a concealed desire to bury. 
 
 I have certainly come to understand how exorbitant are the 
 claims which are made upon the journalist. He belongs to a 
 class of men who ought to know everything. Journalists are 
 something like architects or housewives. An architect should 
 be an artist ; a surveyor ; an engineer, civil, mechanical and 
 sanitary ; a man who knows all about wood, metal, brick and 
 stone ; a financier ; a manager of men ; and I know not what 
 beside. Well, you know an architect is never all this, and 
 rarely any part of it to perfection ; yet he is often a wonder- 
 fully good architect. I have not time to enumerate the quali- 
 fications of a good housewife. Perfection in them all is 
 unattainable, but Heaven be praised, there are still excellent 
 housewives. 
 
 A journalist'sequipment would, I imagine, be even larger than 
 that of either of the two classes I have named, if he were to be 
 fully qualified to understand the things with which he has to 
 deal. I realize now, therefore, quite clearly, that if a journalist 
 were sufficiently scientific to be able to report my lectures with 
 the fullness and appreciation of which I at one time thought 
 
 1 Address to the West Riding District of the Institute of Journalists, 
 delivered at Leeds February 9, 1910. 
 
SCIENCE AND THE PRESS 53 
 
 them worthy, he would probably have lost the balance and 
 catholicity of mind which are only secured by knowing a 
 uniformly limited amount about a very large number of 
 subjects. 
 
 In this respect the journalist resembles the English Minister 
 of State, and I believe the similarity is not accidental. It is a 
 well established principle in the construction of English Minis- 
 tries that a statesman shall be fit for any office. With perfect 
 complacency a man, who could not be trusted to navigate a 
 canal boat, undertakes supreme control of the British Navy, 
 whilst another man, with a private taste for moral philosophy, 
 becomes Minister for War. Either may be called upon to 
 become Chancellor of the Exchequer or Colonial Secretary at 
 a moment's notice. It would probably be considered dangerous 
 to put a real specialist at the head of any department of the 
 State. What is desired is that a statesman shall not be a 
 narrow man, who will be without a sense of proportion. He 
 must not have the partiality of an enthusiast, nor be carried by 
 special knowledge too much in advance of public opinion. . 
 
 I imagine the same reasons hold in the case of the journalist : 
 his most fundamental requirement is that he should keep in 
 touch with public taste and public opinion. And so I have 
 come to sympathize with him in his difficulties, and to share 
 the general admiration of the way in which he does his multi- 
 farious work. I have often been struck with wonder at the 
 seemingly instinctive way in which he will extract what the 
 public wants from large collections of what it may need, but 
 doesn't want. 
 
 Generally speaking, then, my old grievance is gone, or, 
 perhaps, I should say it has assumed a different form, for I 
 still think the Press negligent of science. But then I think 
 the whole nation negligent of science, and if the function of 
 the Press is to reflect public opinion, I think it reflects it very 
 fairly in the matter of science. 
 
54 SCIENCE AND THE PRESS 
 
 How long will it be, I wonder, before science comes to its 
 own in the general education and the general economy of the 
 nation? One would think sometimes from what people say 
 that science had gained its place. Believe me, this is not the 
 case. A good deal has been done ; science appears in our 
 curricula, and is a great deal more respectable than it was; 
 but it is still quite a prevalent opinion that a man may be 
 styled well-educated and not know any science at all. It 
 would occasion no surprise if in the whole British Cabinet 
 there were not enough science to pass one member of it through 
 a matriculation examination. This would not be so bad were 
 these people not impenitent. A remark was quoted to me the 
 other day which I believe to be typical. It came from the 
 lips of a Member of Parliament of distinguished literary position. 
 He said, ' I don't care twopence for science ; I don't know 
 why water does not run up-hill, and I don't want to know '. 
 Now, of course, the feeling behind this remark is merely that 
 science is a mechanical and soulless thing, and that with all 
 human history, human literature, human society, and human 
 nature to study, one may well be excused from spending time 
 in learning about the laws of the inanimate world. Of course 
 our friend was speaking in ignorance, and his remark was 
 exactly on a par with those we so often hear about the futility 
 of classical studies. What does it matter to a soap-boiler or 
 a surgeon who won at Marathon or Salamis ? But then our 
 friend was thought merely to be smart and amusing when he 
 gloried in his ignorance of science, whereas if the soap-boiler 
 or the surgeon had merely said Salamis instead of Salamis 
 what then ? Think of the sniffings and shrugs and glances that 
 poor uneducated man would have provoked. 
 
 Now I have no sympathy whatever with a contemptuous 
 attitude towards classical or literary studies. All I wish to 
 say is, that until science is treated with as much respect as the 
 older subjects of study, it will not have come by its rights. 
 
SCIENCE AND THE PRESS 55 
 
 This respect it does not receive. It is still looked upon with 
 a good deal of distrust by the theologians: it is not taken 
 seriously by the typical headmaster of our public schools (of 
 course it is in the curriculum, but it is not in his heart) ; it has 
 a miserable position in the Departments of the State ; it is not 
 appreciated in the business world. 
 
 This being the case, it is not very surprising to find the 
 position it occupies in the Press. Yet the Press does a good 
 deal more than reflect public opinion. Take art, for example. 
 What standard of opinion is adopted there? Imagine a news- 
 paper critique of the Royal Academy, accurately reflecting the 
 public opinion on art derived from the majority of its readers ! 
 No, in art, in music, and in literature the Press aspires to the 
 rank of expert and guide ; it holds up an ideal to its readers, 
 and readily prints columns of technical criticism that must 
 seem strange stuff' indeed to the overwhelming majority who 
 do not read it. A newspaper would think it discreditable to 
 commit any solecism in dealing with these matters. 
 
 In science it is entirely different. I admit, of course, that 
 the public does not want science. It likes to hear about the 
 North Pole and the Comet, because it is stirred by the hazards 
 of our seeking the one and the hazards of our being sought by 
 the other. It likes to hear about the price of radium and the 
 progress of modern alchemy. It is interested when some man 
 of science takes to amateur theology, or when another says 
 the coal supply is getting exhausted. 
 
 Pray do not suppose that I am taking a superfine pose and 
 sneering at curiosity, which, if somewhat trivial, is quite natural 
 and harmless. I know there are vast numbers of people who 
 are more interested in reading those graphic accounts of how 
 the Prime Minister ' entered the House smiling and stood with 
 one hand on the brass-bound box' than in the momentous 
 speech, which intervened before he 'resumed his seat and 
 chatted pleasantly with the Chancellor of the Exchequer 
 
56 SCIENCE AND THE PRESS 
 
 resplendent in a new suit of Welsh Flannel '. What I complain 
 of is that science is not taken in hand sufficiently seriously by 
 the Press itself, and that in addition to giving the public what 
 it wants, it does not hold out a higher ideal of scientific 
 interest. But I go further than that I am obliged to say 
 that even in giving the public the oleograph and brass band 
 sort of science which it appreciates, very few newspapers are 
 in a position to protect themselves against publishing inaccur- 
 acies of the most glaring kind, and broadly speaking when I 
 see a scientific news paragraph in a paper (I do not mean an 
 article) well, I am prepared for anything. Let me give one 
 or two illustrations of what I mean. Here for example is a 
 paragraph headed ' A Scene at a Mudborough Committee.' 
 c In consequence of a difference of opinion between Alderman 
 A B , the chairman, and Mr. C D , the vice- 
 chairman, as to the method of producing formic sulphate, the 
 Chairman left the room and the business had to be adjourned.' 
 Now what is there wrong here ? Only this, that there is no 
 such substance in heaven or earth as formic sulphate. You 
 will observe they adjourned the business, and I don't wonder 
 at it. Here is another this time from a paper whose title 
 suggests the very opposite of fiction. It is one of those feminine 
 letters from a lady of fashion, which I understand are usually 
 composed by elderly gentlemen. It extols a gas stove for 
 which it says no flue is required for carrying away the products 
 of combustion, ' for the very sufficient reason that there are no 
 such products, combustion being perfect'. Here is a calm 
 enunciation of the destructibility of matter. Again, from a 
 London daily : { The theory advanced by Mme. Cavalier in a 
 lecture on Thursday that diamonds have sex, and if placed 
 together in a box will multiply, is described by Professor 
 Pringle, of the Museum of Practical Geology, South Kensington, 
 as absolutely untenable. All jewels are the result of chemical 
 production, he says, and unless fused to liquid form it is 
 
SCIENCE AND THE PRESS 57 
 
 impossible to add anything to them.' Fancy calling in the 
 expert for such an opinion on such a question ! I give one 
 more example from a weekly journal of high repute and terrible 
 seriousness. This journal gravely discussed a rumour that an 
 American inventor had discovered a compound which possessed 
 the peculiarity of exploding ' forward only.' It was pointed 
 out that if the report were correct the defence of the Northern 
 Frontier of India would be facilitated as it would be possible 
 to substitute parchment for metal in the construction of guns. 
 The subject was referred to again in another article on the 
 ' Air-Cannon '. Nor could the remonstrances of a distinguished 
 friend of mine gain admission to the pages of the journal. 
 
 This is rather an old example, but it is so striking that I 
 cannot help recalling it, as an illustration of the kind of thing 
 that is still to be found in high-class journalism. 
 
 In case you may think I have been hoarding these examples 
 in a revengeful spirit, I will take events of the present week. 
 Here is a paragraph that appears in Wednesday's paper : 
 
 The Discovery of Polonium 
 Five Thousand Times more Rare than Radium. 
 
 Paris, Tuesday. 
 
 Madame Curie and M. Debierne, according to a report made 
 to the Academic des Sciences, state that the substance named 
 Polonium has much greater radio active power than radium. 
 
 It is five thousand times more rare than the latter, but dis- 
 integrated much more rapidly. Thus a particle of polonium, 
 obtained with enormous difficulty, lost half its weight in 140 
 days, while it takes a thousand years for a similar particle of 
 radium to disappear altogether. 
 
 If the transformations which these scientists hope to trace 
 within a year or so are confirmed it will constitute a revolution 
 in chemical science. 
 
 What exception is to be taken to this ? Well, in the first 
 place Polonium was discovered twelve years ago, and that 
 discounts the headline. The first paragraph announces nothing 
 that was not published in 1906. The same is true of the second 
 
 2461 H 
 
58 SCIENCE AND THE PRESS 
 
 paragraph, except the last part, which is quite wrong. The 
 last paragraph is well, perhaps it does not matter. 1 
 
 Now, when I looked this morning at my paper I felt that 
 there must have been some conspiracy to take away any justi- 
 fication for the remarks I was going to make this evening, for 
 there, in the honourable position of a leading article, was an 
 admirable and interesting discussion of what had actually been 
 discovered about Polonium, and what the paragraph I have just 
 quoted had made such an unsuccessful attempt to announce. 
 The article was evidently written by someone who was well 
 versed in the subject. .1 say I look upon this phenomenon as 
 the result either of a. conspiracy or some strange accident. 
 
 I do not wish at all to overstate my case, and I should like 
 to make full acknowledgement of signs of improvement which 
 are apparent. In recent years The Times has begun to 
 publish a weekly Engineering Supplement which is seriously 
 and admirably scientific. The Manchester Guardian also 
 has frequent articles on the industrial application of science 
 which are authoritative. The lamented Tribune had a 
 weekly scientific causerie written in excellent style by a distin- 
 guished physicist. I might give illustrations also from nearer 
 home as, indeed,! have with some penitence just done. Lately 
 I had a communication from another great London daily fore- 
 shadowing a determined attempt to do more justice to science. 
 
 Now I am afraid you may think that I am adopting a some- 
 what censorious and ungracious attitude, and that you are 
 being lectured to, I may say lectured at, more than you bargained 
 for. I will not longer delay giving you my reasons for speaking 
 as I have done. The fact is, my desire that the Press should 
 take a warmer interest in science comes from my sense of the 
 tremendous power for good or ill that rests in the hands of 
 
 1 In the eleven years since this was written there has been little improve- 
 mentj. Equally absurd examples are available from this week's press 
 January 1921. 
 
SCIENCE AND THE PRESS '59 
 
 journalists. The view that the Press merely reflects public 
 opinion will not bear examination. The journalist knows, of 
 course, that he must give, his readers what they want ; but he 
 goes far beyond this. He teaches and preaches, and leads and 
 governs well or ill as the case may be. The newspapers are 
 the literary daily bread, and, indeed, the exclusive literary diet 
 of the great majority of mankind ; they furnish directly or 
 indirectly the ideas and aspirations of the community. 
 
 I cannot get out of the habit of taking journalism very 
 seriously. I was brought up in the belief that English news- 
 papers were not mainly governed by commercial enterprise 
 and mercenary aims, but that there were high purposes and 
 noble aspirations behind them. They had individuality, 
 character, and reputation. They took themselves seriously, 
 and the public took them seriously. I remember how we 
 despised the typical American paper with its screeching rest- 
 less sensationalism, its prying vulgar personalities ; how we 
 rejoiced when an attempt to carry on a London issue of the 
 New York Herald failed. 
 
 I am afraid that the Press to-day has not uniformly the 
 character which I have just described, but still there remains a 
 great measure of authority enthroned in the Editorial chairs, 
 and I for one am extremely desirous of enlisting that authority 
 in aid of science. 
 
 You will not think, I hope, that if I plead for more attention 
 to science it is for a small or selfish end. It is because I am 
 persuaded of the enormously important part which science has 
 to play in the future of civilization. If we begin with the most 
 obvious material things, it is hardly necessary to point out how 
 much our convenience and comfort depend upon the applica- 
 tions of science. I have at home a spinning-wheel which was 
 used by my grandmother, and a tinder-box which was used by 
 the grandfather of a Jriend. When I was a student the electric 
 light was occasionally shown as a mere .scientific experiment, 
 
60 SCIENCE AND THE PRESS 
 
 and I remember that at one of the first lectures I gave in Leeds, 
 the Chairman said he did not think any man in the room would 
 live to see electricity become a general source of illumination. 
 In those days the majority of people felt no difficulty in 
 believing in spontaneous generation ; bacteriology was at its 
 birth, and antiseptic surgery was just beginning to command the 
 attention of the medical profession. We forget, I think, the 
 pace at which we are progressing, and the rapidity with which 
 the applications of science are transforming the conditions of life. 
 When we come to view the industries of the country we see 
 a like transformation. I cannot attempt to summarize the 
 changes that have taken place, but we all know that to-day the 
 word * manufacture ' is almost a misnomer. Hands, indeed, are 
 still necessary, but it is now the brain that tells. Our indus- 
 tries assume more and more the character of applied sciences, 
 and if they are to be conducted intelligently and to be pro- 
 gressive they must invest liberally in scientific brains. This is 
 a subject on which I have preached in season and out of season, 
 and occasionally I have got into trouble for it. People say it 
 does no good it merely irritates ; they are tired of this ever- 
 lasting talk about the Germans and their coal-tar colours. Is 
 not the Englishman as good a man as any other ? Has he not 
 risen to the summit of industrial and political eminence in 
 spite of his alleged neglect of science ? Are there not many 
 other things besides science which are indispensable for success 
 in manufacture certain deeply ingrained elemental qualities 
 in which the Englishman is supreme ? I give a ready affirmative 
 to all these questions, and yet and yet I do most firmly and 
 profoundly believe that our greatest material danger lies in the 
 neglect of science in relation to industry. This was eloquently 
 pleaded in a memorable letter by Professor Huxley many years 
 ago. Things have improved since then undoubtedly ; but that 
 there is still tremendous leeway to make up I venture to say 
 I am certain. I could enumerate to you, if it were permissible, 
 
SCIENCE AND THE PRESS 61 
 
 personal experiences of my own that are decisive on the point, 
 and if this is so, you can understand how difficult it is for me 
 to avoid calling attention as pointedly and publicly as I can 
 to what I consider to be a grave national danger. You will 
 understand how solicitous I am that the great cohort of public 
 advisors represented by the Press should lose no opportunity 
 of urging upon the community the importance of this question. 
 It is no good doing it upon hearsay ; we do not want mere 
 commonplaces such as are the currency of the ordinary speaker 
 at a prize distribution ; we want to have incorporated in the 
 Press a sufficient amount of direct first-hand knowledge of 
 these matters, so that real conviction may be heard behind the 
 well-turned phrases, so that the pressure may be incessant and 
 no opportunities lost. 
 
 I can imagine someone contesting the assertions I have 
 made. I could myself point to some splendid examples which 
 this country has furnished of the applications of science to 
 industry, of branches of manufacture in which we have nothing 
 to learn, and in which we lead the world. I could give you 
 examples from abroad, where with tremendous scientific para- 
 phernalia they are not doing quite as well as we are here by 
 the use of rather more mother-wit ; and I could end up by 
 saying like a true Briton I am sure amidst applause that an 
 ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory a profound truth 
 provided, of course, that the practice is good and the theory bad. 
 
 The subject is a complicated and difficult one. It is not, 
 perhaps, as complicated and difficult as the fiscal question. 
 Supposing, however, for the sake of argument, that it is equally 
 important, what are the relative resources of the Press for in- 
 forming public opinion on the two questions? You know that 
 there is not a single newspaper that could afford to be without 
 expert knowledge on industrial finance. How many are there, 
 I will not say that have access, but who think it important to 
 have access, to expert knowledge on industrial science ? 
 
62 SCIENCE AND THE PRESS 
 
 I pass now to another aspect of the subject ; I will leave 
 the material side. That science so largely affects bodily com- 
 fort and material prosperity is to many people one of its 
 greatest dangers. I would ask you to consider the effect of 
 science on modes of thought ; I do not mean on opinion but 
 on the method of forming opinion. I should tire you if I tried 
 to extol science at any length in this respect, for the subject is 
 so well worn. But everyone admits, I think, that science has 
 brought instruments of precision into the domain of thought 
 which can be used more easily and more safely than any other. 
 Science is really an animated logic in which the mind receives 
 its first training among real things real palpable things not 
 mere words or abstractions. Now, many years ago you may 
 remember that Matthew Arnold in pronouncing sentence on 
 various European nations condemned the English as being 
 fundamentally deficient in lucidity. Many people thought he 
 justified the charge in making it, for they did not know what 
 he meant and that, in its turn, justified him. I think it is 
 not difficult to understand what he meant, and I, for one, 
 accept the judgement as just and discerning. On the morrow 
 of a General Election, I do not think it necessary to labour 
 this point. How then are we to cultivate lucidity ? Doubtless 
 there are many ways of doing it, but if it involves an improve- 
 ment in our methods of getting to the bottom of things, of 
 collecting and weighing evidence, of organizing our facts, and 
 of generalizing them to a clear conclusion, I cannot see a more 
 hopeful expedient than to bring to bear the methods that have 
 been so wonderfully successful in the realms of science. I am 
 not going to talk politics, as you can well understand, but I ask 
 you to consider the Fiscal question from this point of view. 
 Just think of the method taken by the country to decide this 
 question ; think of the kind of appeal to the intelligence that 
 has been made ; think of the competence of the average elector 
 to weigh up the pros and cons of a question of such complexity. 
 
SCIENCE AND THE PRESS 63 
 
 And yet how far have we heard from our guides, philosophers 
 and friends any sustained advocacy of a better course ? Are 
 we to conclude that this country is so inextricably bound in 
 the ties of partisanship that it is hopeless to constitute from its 
 leading men, a court willing and competent to make an impartial 
 inquiry, to collect and weigh evidence on a complex question 
 of vital national importance, and to declare an opinion con- 
 ceived in the interests of the nation as a whole ? 
 
 You will ask what can science do here? I do not give 
 a direct answer. I can only say that the more familiarity we 
 have as a nation with the methods of science, the more we 
 shall distrust mob-law, the more we shall learn that the pre- 
 judices, the jealousies, the vested interests, the intolerance 
 which inevitably arise when well-meaning men segregate 
 themselves into parties, sects, and schools of thought, are 
 fetters on the mind and spirit, and an incalculable hindrance 
 to human progress. A vicious loyalty is created which makes 
 men aggressive and vindictive towards those who consort in 
 a different school of thought; which makes them palter 
 with the truth and finds them in extremity driven to the 
 expedient, now so evident in the world, of maintaining that 
 white is only a lighter, and black a darker, shade of grey. 
 
 I commend to you most earnestly, I hope not arrogantly, 
 the task of doing more than you have yet done to educate 
 the people in the knowledge, the love, and the right use of 
 science. The century that has not long closed has brought to 
 mankind intellectual weapons mightier even than those forged 
 in the days of ancient Greece, and we are, consciously or not, 
 on the wave of an intellectual movement of overwhelming 
 force. 
 
 Science is one of the things in this world that must con- 
 tinue to grow in power and influence. Its march is irresistible 
 and endless, a progress from which there can be no retreat. 
 The hypotheses of science vary from day to day ; the fabric 
 
64 SCIENCE AND THE PRESS 
 
 grows steadily. It is there ; you can see it. That I conceive 
 to be the ultimate value of its material side ; it proves that 
 your progress is real. Science is not a philosophical or 
 metaphysical system, a scheme of thought, which may be over- 
 come by a greater scheme of thought to be developed in the 
 future. It may look like it. You may hear men discussing, 
 like the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, how many fairy 
 electrons can dance on the point of a needle ; but there issues 
 from the discussion not a nightmare literature to hold men's 
 minds in bondage and mystification, but something like wire- 
 less telegraphy to relieve an anxious heart that is yearning for 
 the safety of a friend in peril a thousand miles away. Science 
 is a revelation, a revelation that will stand the test of time. 
 Poets may sing, and eternal truth may be in their song. The 
 great races of the world may each have their own prophet, 
 and what they have said about what was and what is to be may 
 have eternal truth in it. You may believe one or you may 
 believe the other. It depends, I suppose, on where you were 
 born, or on the measure of authority some human being has 
 exercised upon you, or the extent to which your hope or fear 
 allows you to be swayed by some enchanting vision. Science 
 does not enter here. It pretends to no final knowledge of the 
 ultimate or the infinite. It has gone after all but a little way 
 yet into the mysteries of great Nature. What it has revealed 
 is there for all the races and generations of mankind to see 
 and acknowledge, and for none to deny, unless forsooth, in the 
 strange wanderings of the human spirit, it pleases them to 
 deny everything outside that spirit. So much as is revealed 
 we may believe. How much we may hope is at our option 
 an indulgence that few will resist in its clamorous onset. Yet 
 there is something stronger still that can come, and should 
 come to give peace to our spirit reverence and humility, as 
 we gaze upon the little fragments of truth that our Titanic 
 efforts have quarried from the illimitable store. 
 
SCIENCE AND THE PRESS 65 
 
 It is because I see in science the surest and most permanent 
 springs of reverence that I care to fight for it, that I grow 
 vehement in its defence, urgent with its claims. I am outraged 
 when I hear it subject to the flippant jests of some self-styled 
 humanists half- educated men I should rather call them, who 
 stand deaf amid the deepest harmonies of nature. 
 
 I deplore, like other men, and more than most, the mud of 
 materialism that fringes the path of science. I do not know 
 that a bigoted man of science is more harmful than any other 
 kind of bigot, but he is sufficiently unedifying, and I will gladly 
 join in suppressing him. But that the essential tendency of 
 science is materialistic I would deny with my last breath, and if 
 there is anything unprovable about which I feel confident/ it 
 is that science is destined to provide humanity with the abiding 
 reverence, the love of truth, the freedom and sanity of mind 
 and spirit, without which religion and morals are but names 
 and life is not worth living. 
 
 8461 
 
The University and W omens Work 1 
 
 THE movement which we inaugurate to-day embodies one 
 more attempt to knit university studies to the common 
 occupations of life and to break down the barriers which 
 custom has set up between thought and action. This is a 
 cause which I serve with my whole heart, for nothing has 
 seemed to me more necessary in the interest both of education 
 and of right-living. 
 
 I think that no one who surveys the educational history 
 of this country can fail to see that there is a tendency for the 
 world of learning and the world of action to drift apart, until 
 they seem to be almost in opposition. The earlier part of my 
 life was spent largely in the atmosphere of what is convention- 
 ally called business, and I am certain there prevailed a general 
 feeling among business men, that not only a little but also 
 a good deal of learning was a dangerous thing. Such aphor- 
 isms as ' an ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory ' are 
 characteristic of that feeling. Later on I became more 
 immersed in the world of learning, and encountered men 
 whose habitual attitude towards business was one of intellec- 
 tual disdain. 
 
 I believe that the explanation of this state of things is to 
 be found in the fact that the educational system of this 
 country has been for so long conceived exclusively from the 
 point of view of the learned professions. We must remember 
 
 1 Address delivered at the Inauguration of the King's College (London 
 University) courses for the Higher Education of Women in Home Science 
 and HouseholdJEconomics, October 2, 1908. 
 
THE UNIVERSITY AND WOMEN'S WORK 67 
 
 how sharp the distinction once was between these professions 
 and other callings in life, and how little there was in the 
 practical arts that exacted anything in the way of formal 
 education beyond that general training of the intelligence, 
 which improves the mental powers without in any way 
 specializing knowledge. Special training for the practical arts, 
 so long as they were nothing but crafts, lay only in practising 
 them under a good master ; apprenticeship was the real 
 preparatory school. An extended school or college education 
 did not seem to be very much to the point. It seemed to 
 involve the risk of detaching a man from the currents of active 
 life and making him into a kind of superior person endowed 
 with a large fund of unnegotiable paper knowledge. It 
 involved, also, a sacrifice of those early years of practical 
 training which some people consider indispensable for the 
 inculcation of good craftsmanship. 
 
 It is surely to be deplored that the educational institutions 
 and systems of this country have been so much designed for 
 the interest of one set of callings, and that they have been so 
 slowly adapted to changing needs. 
 
 It is not uncommon to find people talking of universities as 
 pre-eminently places for general education. No doubt they 
 are so in a broad sense, that is to say, so far as general 
 culture of the mind, the training of character, the development 
 of individuality, and the acquisition of the graces are concerned. 
 But surely it is also the case that the older universities were 
 and still are, to a very large degree, schools of specialized 
 professional knowledge. Oxford and Cambridge have been 
 training schools for ministers of religion, for lawyers, doctors, 
 schoolmasters, statesmen, men of letters, and men of science, 
 and this fact has had the most important consequences. The 
 preparatory education suitable for these special studies became 
 stereotyped as the one and only kind of preparatory education 
 for mankind in general, and it was established, in various 
 
68 THE UNIVERSITY AND WOMEN'S WORK 
 
 degrees of dilution, for all classes of the community throughout 
 the length and breadth of the land. I have heard it alleged 
 that this dominance of what are called classical studies is 
 quite as much due to the former practical necessity of learning 
 Latin, because it was the common tongue of the learned 
 professions, as to the intrinsic merits of the language and of 
 the humanizing literature that it enshrines. 
 
 The fact that the education of this country has been so long 
 dominated by the interests of the learned professions, seems 
 to me to account for a good deal, and, amongst other things, 
 for the want of sympathy with education which has character- 
 ized the average Englishman outside the professions in question. 
 Attempts to add to education or to alter it in the interest of 
 those who are engaged in other occupations have been made 
 mainly outside the old universities, and have produced a new 
 educational movement which, instead of being merely supple- 
 mentary to the ancient order of things, has come to be at 
 some points in antagonism to it, and given rise to mischievous 
 attempts to set one kind of learning above another. 
 
 The fact is, that the great change which took place in the 
 conditions under which the practical arts are or may be 
 pursued was not accompanied by simultaneous changes in the 
 world of education. The change that I allude to is this, that 
 whilst at the beginning of the nineteenth century the practical 
 arts were little more than crafts, at the beginning of the 
 twentieth century we find that they have an intellectual basis. 
 The laws of nature are not new, and industry has always had 
 to conform to them, but the revelation of these laws, their 
 bearing upon industrial operations, their intimate relation to 
 success and failure these are matters of new knowledge, and 
 result from the marvellous intellectual achievements of that 
 century which posterity will surely know as the golden age 
 of science. 
 
 In my dictionary I find a profession defined as ' a calling 
 
THE UNIVERSITY AND WOMEN'S WORK 69 
 
 superior to a mere trade or handicraft '. Note the word 
 superior. Superior in what respect? I do not know I 
 cannot imagine in what respect, for example, is the work of 
 a trained surgeon to-day superior to that of a trained agricul- 
 turist. Certainly it is not intellectually superior. A good 
 farmer of the old-fashioned kind may remain what he was 
 a man who, by virtue of other things than scientific knowledge, 
 can successfully till the soil, rear good live stock and turn out 
 good produce ; but we know that real improvement and 
 progress rest with the trained agriculturist, with whom farming 
 is a science as well as an art a man who is working in 
 obedience to principles rather than precepts, and has the light 
 of connected scientific knowledge to guide his hands, to 
 interpret his own and other people's experience and to give 
 him new ideas. 
 
 And so with a host of other practical arts. They have their 
 technologies ; they are linked to high learning ; they engage 
 the mind as deeply and as worthily as any learned profession. 
 
 These things are being recognized, and special training is 
 now being provided, especially in our newer universities, for 
 many industrial callings. We are also seriously asking our- 
 selves whether the type of general education, which has so 
 long prevailed in our schools, is not capable of some readjust- 
 ment which will make it better subserve the life interests of 
 the average man and woman. The importance of such an 
 clement as manual training is being successfully urged, and, 
 indeed, there is at the present time, amidst the clamour of 
 religious controversy, a peaceful revolution taking place in our 
 methods of education. 
 
 None of us, I suppose, would wish to forget that education 
 should concern itself primarily with man as a human being, 
 but I confess I become impatient when I find people exalting 
 this ideal to the exclusion of all others, and I have a particular 
 grudge against those people who will approve special education 
 
70 THE UNIVERSITY AND WOMEN'S WORK 
 
 for the learned professions but take alarm whenever any other 
 kind of special education is mentioned. People who look with 
 complacency on the association of a hospital with a university 
 for the benefit of students of medicine are sometimes scandal- 
 ized by the suggestion of a university farm or anything in the 
 nature of a workshop. 
 
 I have made these remarks for two reasons. In the first 
 place, I wanted to explain and to discount a kind of criticism 
 to which we are sure to be subjected because we are doing 
 something new in the way of special education. In the second 
 place, I wanted to emphasize the fact that at the present day 
 we have for men, as distinguished from women, university 
 training for a great variety of professions and industrial 
 callings. 
 
 Let us now ask how matters stand in the case of women. 
 What are the university privileges of women? They are 
 practically these, that so long as women are willing to restrict 
 themselves to the same callings as men, they have pretty 
 nearly equal educational opportunities ; but so far as women's 
 special callings are concerned I am aware of no special 
 university courses anywhere in this country. 
 
 The question then arises, are there in fact any such special 
 callings to which university education may be particularly 
 directed ? My own reply to this question is a most emphatic 
 yes. The most usual calling of women, the making and 
 administering of a home, is surely one to which a university 
 may fitly contribute special knowledge. 
 
 We must not assume that this view will be universally 
 admitted. On the contrary, it has been maintained with great 
 vigour and persuasiveness that there is no place at all for any 
 such special studies as I have implied. With respect to all 
 matters of the home we are told that what is wanted is that 
 women should bring their intelligence and common sense to 
 bear upon it, that it is nothing very mysterious, nothing that 
 
THE UNIVERSITY AND WOMEN'S WORK 71 
 
 an intelligent woman whose mind has been trained, whose 
 habits of observation have been called out, cannot learn very 
 quickly if she desires. A really well-educated woman, it is 
 said, will know what she wants to learn and how to learn it. 
 ' The time for learning it is^when she needs it. What she needs 
 is a trained intelligence, a wide outlook, real interests in life.' 
 
 I am very familiar with arguments of this kind ; they have 
 confronted every attempt to create special studies. They do 
 not impress me, but they are difficult to reply to because one 
 can hardly do so without suggesting that the people who urge 
 them are deficient precisely in the kind of knowledge they 
 deprecate. I have been told again and again by men engaged 
 in chemical industry that chemistry was of no use to them, 
 and they have maintained this while their fortunes were being 
 ruined for lack of what a knowledge of that very science 
 would supply. 
 
 I admit that it is very important for all of us who arc 
 advocating special educational schemes not to forget how 
 much the trained and flexible mind, the wide intellectual 
 horizon, the aesthetic perception of the fitness of things, the 
 sense of proportion, all secured it may be by the most remote 
 studies, promote efficiency when mind confronts action. Let 
 us remember also how much there is of a man's and a woman's 
 best powers that comes from influences outside all formal 
 educational systems. Men and women have talents and 
 aptitudes of all kinds. These are developed in the school of 
 experience and may become really great powers which 
 determine success. A good business man, a born housewife 
 these are well-recognized types, but who will Venture upon an 
 analysis of their qualities ? We must never underrate the 
 value and power of native talent and of experience. I know 
 a man whose great worldly success is attributed to his power 
 of judging a piece of leather by its feel, and you will find some 
 Sheffield workmen who can detect by eye the difference 
 
72 THE UNIVERSITY AND WOMEN'S WORK 
 
 between one piece of steel and another when the difference in 
 the proportion of carbon is only a tenth of one per cent. 
 Whatever we do we must not belittle these things ; they are 
 vastly important, and it is the theorist's tendency to overlook 
 them that so exasperates those who know their real value. 
 
 All the same, do not let us be deterred from enlisting all the 
 intellectual aid we can secure in furthering all good human 
 pursuits, however much they may seem to 'depend for suc- 
 cess on experience or talent. An educational institution is 
 intended to economize experience and to develop talent. It 
 is a repository where accumulated experience is organized and 
 distributed as knowledge, and where the means of acquiring 
 experience in the most intelligent and effective way should 
 be imparted. The statement I have quoted, that a well- 
 educated woman will know what she wants to learn about the 
 household and how to learn it, and Jthat the time for learning 
 it will be when she really needs it, seems to be a negation of 
 all educational enterprise. Is there, or is there not, a body 
 of special knowledge lying near the work of a woman who has 
 to administer a home ? Is the position of such a person at all 
 comparable with that of an agriculturist or an engineer ? If 
 it is, then the province of knowledge in question is surely 
 worth cultivating. I have not a moment's hesitation in 
 answering these questions in the affirmative. There is un- 
 doubtedly a vast body of special knowledge lying in the closest 
 relationship to the administration of a home. This knowledge 
 is of a very varied kind. It may relate to the humbler house- 
 hold arts such as those of the kitchen or laundry ; it may 
 concern the more distinguished subjects of hygiene or econ- 
 omics ; or it may range into the still sublimer regions of 
 psychology and ethics. 
 
 The short syllabus of the new courses which are being 
 established in the Women's Department of King's College 
 discloses, I think, an ample field of special knowledge which it 
 
THE UNIVERSITY AND WOMEN'S WORK 73 
 
 will tax the resources of any university student to exhaust. 
 Applied chemistry, sanitary science and applied hygiene, 
 bacteriology, general biology, physics these sciences of course 
 accompanied by practical work ; economics of the household, 
 general and child psychology, ethics ; practical work and 
 demonstrations in the actual household arts here is a syllabus 
 which in the hands of skilled teachers will provide an education 
 which may be fairly placed on the same plane as the special 
 education proper to any learned profession. It is not a 
 question of whether we can get along without this knowledge or 
 of imposing a formidable curriculum on all who aspire to 
 manage a home. The question is this is there not here a 
 store of knowledge lying pent-up which ought to flow into the 
 human calling to which it relates, knowledge which is certain 
 to improve, enlighten, and elevate that calling and to contribute 
 to human well-being ? If so, it is surely worthy work for a 
 university to disseminate this knowledge as best it can. 
 
 The possibility and advisability of organized instruction in 
 reference to some sections of home life have long been recog- 
 nized, and for many years we have had schools of domestic 
 economy where the household arts have been taught by those 
 who are specially skilled in them. It is admitted that among 
 the poorer classes of the community the condition of things is 
 such that passable competence in even the most primitive 
 domestic arts such as cooking, washing, and sewing is not 
 secured if things are left to take care of themselves. The 
 crudest facts of hygiene, the importance of cleanliness and 
 fresh air, the simplest means of protection against disease are 
 not learned or respected. It would be possible and legitimate 
 to paint an appalling picture of the misery and suffering which 
 exist in the homes of quite respectable poor people simply and 
 solely because of their ignorance. The facts have forced 
 themselves irresistibly on public attention, and the State has 
 found itself compelled to give more and more time and money 
 
 am K 
 
74 THE UNIVERSITY AND WOMEN'S WORK 
 
 towards supplying in schools some rudimentary knowledge of 
 the domestic arts and the simple laws of hygiene. No one, 
 I think, will contend that a solution of the difficulty is to be 
 found here in general education in the three R's, and it is in 
 supplying special teachers for children in elementary schools 
 that schools of domestic economy have found their chief work. 
 
 When we pass from the poorer classes to the more fortunate 
 sections of the community it is not so easy to disclose the 
 ignorance that prevails or trace its consequences. Of its 
 existence and of its far-reaching effect on the well-being of the 
 nation I have not a shadow of doubt. The subject is not an 
 easy or a pleasant one to talk about, and it will probably be 
 most prudent if I do not enlarge upon it. I can only say 
 that it astonishes me more and more as my experience of 
 life increases, to see how complacently people endure in their 
 homes the inconveniences, the perils, and even the tragedies of 
 life that accrue not from faults of the heart, but from crass 
 ignorance ignorance that would have been remedied long ago 
 if we had not got our ideas of education so absurdly out of 
 focus with the things that matter most. It is, I am sure, not 
 extravagant to say that there is no sphere of human activity 
 where the responsibilities are greater, the issues more vital, 
 and where, accordingly, we are more bound to bring all the 
 resources that intellect can supply. By so doing we may 
 hope to strengthen the power of right thinking and right 
 doing, to emancipate people from the rule of thumb and of 
 recipe, the spurious traditions and the mischievous credulity, 
 that have gained such an extraordinary sway in the domestic 
 world, and to bring about an economy of life, labour, time, and 
 money. 
 
 I believe there was never more need than now for most 
 earnest attention being given to this business of administering 
 a home and of making it one that .may appeal to the intellect 
 as well as the heart. A highly educated woman surely need 
 
THE UNIVERSITY AND WOMEN'S WORK 75 
 
 not mean only one who has gone far in some abstract or 
 professional study. Can she not become highly educated 
 as a home-maker, in the same sense as a man may be 
 educated for engineering ; that is to say, thoroughly equipped 
 with the branches of special knowledge related to the calling ? 
 I believe without doubt she can, and I feel confident that 
 when the way is open we shall find plenty of young women of 
 talent who have the inclination and the opportunity to devote 
 a few years to this kind of higher education, and who will 
 return from it ready to enter with redoubled interest and 
 usefulness into the realm of home life, or to take up one of the 
 many posts in civic or social work for which the same type of 
 training is so desirable. 
 
 I have already alluded to the existing schools of domestic 
 economy. These schools have long been doing a most valu- 
 able work, and I particularly desire that we should recognize 
 and acknowledge their services as fully as they deserve. They 
 have in many cases been established by the arduous and self- 
 sacrificing labours of women zealous for the public interest ; in 
 others they have formed a section of the work of polytechnics 
 and kindred institutions. For many years past I have had a 
 semi-official connexion with one of the best of them, and it is 
 through this that I have become impressed with the great 
 importance of the work they have in hand and with the 
 difficulties they have to face. The first demand made of 
 these schools is that they should turn out pupils skilled in the 
 practice of the domestic arts. This, of course, is reasonable 
 enough, but it has made it very difficult for those in charge 
 to include as much of the theoretical or scientific element of the 
 subjects as they would have wished, and the consequence is 
 that they have recruited their pupils largely from the ranks of 
 those whose tastes and talents are of a practical kind. It has 
 long been my desire to see a somewhat different type of 
 training attempted, for ever since I took an interest in these 
 
76 THE UNIVERSITY AND WOMEN'S WORK 
 
 schools I have been more and more impressed with the 
 magnitude and importance of the more theoretical side of 
 household administration, and especially with the undeveloped 
 and unorganized state of the science that relates to it. It 
 has, I confess, been a revelation to me to find how much 
 there is in this direction that lies outside the interest or 
 cognizance of the orthodox professor or teacher of science, 
 how many unsolved problems there are relating to the 
 most common things and operations of the household, and 
 what a field lies open for -interesting and exacting research. 
 I am speaking only of the sciences with which I am most 
 familiar, but if it is true that there is a special province of 
 physics and chemistry associated with' these matters, it is, 
 I believe, not less true that there are special provinces in other 
 branches of knowledge. 
 
 A curriculum which shall include a more thorough study of 
 these special subjects must necessarily differ in aim and 
 character from those which have usually been given in the 
 schools of domestic economy. Inasmuch as it is more theo- 
 retical it will be necessary to exact a higher standard of pre- 
 liminary education, to extend the time of the course and to 
 distribute the theoretical work among the best special teachers 
 that can be secured. The work will indeed not be satisfactory 
 unless it is centred in institutions where it will have the aid of 
 many contributory studies, and where it will lead to the 
 prosecution of vivifying research. So far as the practical side 
 of the household arts is concerned, some sacrifice must be 
 made. The project is surely such as may well come within 
 the province of a university. It certainly demands the highest 
 intellectual resources that we can obtain ; it is in no degree 
 inferior in substance or in aim to any other university work. 
 
 The pupils we turn out will, I am confident, find abundant 
 opportunity for the use of their knowledge. There is use for 
 it ample use for it as I have said, in the privacy of home 
 
THE UNIVERSITY AND WOMEN'S WORK 77 
 
 life ; there is use for it in the management and administration 
 of public charities and other institutions and occupations 
 relating especially to women and children, and there is use for 
 it in the teaching world. In this connexion I should like to 
 draw attention to the very interesting changes and develop- 
 ments that are taking place in girls' secondary schools. On 
 every side these schools are providing special courses of work 
 relating to household affairs, usually following, but sometimes 
 accompanying,. the ordinary school course; and there is, I am 
 happy to say, an ever- increasing desire to make the science 
 teaching in girls' schools bear more particularly on the things 
 and phenomena of the household. From my own observations, 
 and from the letters that I am continually receiving, I am sure 
 there is a real dearth of teachers who have reasonable famili- 
 arity with that borderland knowledge which lies between the 
 formal sciences and the practical arts of the household just 
 that part of knowledge in fact which we include in our new 
 scheme. I do not doubt therefore that many of our pupils 
 will become teachers of a true domestic science, that they will 
 co-operate in an effective way with the teachers of the domestic 
 arts, and that they will help to raise the position of these 
 home training classes in secondary schools, so that they may 
 not be regarded as a sort of despised feminine modern-side, 
 destined primarily for those who are deficient in brains or 
 industry. 
 
 The establishment of courses of instruction in home science 
 and household economics in connexion with universities is no 
 new thing. America has not failed to include this among its 
 abundant educational enterprises, and in far Japan we have 
 a women's university which I believe, from all I have read and 
 learned, might teach us many a useful lesson. We shall do 
 well to study what has been done elsewhere, but I am not 
 desirous that we should merely imitate. Transplanted schemes 
 often perish like exotics, and it is better for us to let our schemes 
 
;H THE UNIVERSITY AND WOMEN'S WORK 
 
 grow under our own special conditions and in conformity with 
 the national genius. We shall doubtless make mistakes and 
 succeed only after patiently groping our way. My chief hope 
 lieSj of course, in a strong conviction of the need of our work, 
 and of its beneficent results on the national life, but in addition 
 to this I may be permitted to say how much my confidence is 
 strengthened by a knowledge of the auspices under which the 
 work is started. 
 
 Our pecuniary resources and our equipment are not all we 
 could desire, but we must be grateful for enough to start 
 upon. I am sure that this is an enterprise which, if successful, 
 will bring the sympathy and support requisite for its main- 
 tenance and expansion, and it is in many ways a less anxious 
 business for those in charge of the work to begin in a modest 
 way than under conditions which create a restless demand for 
 proofs of success. 
 
 I can only say once more I have the fullest confidence that 
 the work to which we are setting our hands is good work that 
 is greatly needed, and that it is work eminently worthy of the 
 brains of a university. If we succeed here, as I have not a 
 doubt we shall, other universities are sure to follow our 
 example, and so it is my fervent hope that we shall see before 
 long a widely disseminated higher education of women which 
 does not carry with it, what has always been to me the 
 melancholy suggestion of women drifting away from the 
 grandest of all their vocations the making and minding of 
 a home. 
 
 Note. The Household and Social Science Department of King's College 
 for Women is now (1921) housed on a site of two and a half acres on 
 Campden Hill in beautiful buildings including Queen Mary's Hostel. 
 About 200 students are in attendance, and the London University has 
 recognized the special studies in its B.Sc. degree. 
 
The Place of Science in Indian 
 National Li 
 
 FOR five months it has been my privilege to reside in the 
 Punjab, and there to do the little that lay in my power 
 to assist the cause of scientific education. I shall not forget, 
 in speaking to you this afternoon, that my experience in India 
 has been limited both as to time and as to place, and I shall 
 try and be on my guard against those hasty generalizations 
 to which one is prone under such conditions as I have described. 
 I find, when I talk with my countrymen in India, that their 
 readiness to dogmatize about the country is pretty well 
 inversely proportional to the time they have spent in it, and 
 the men who have been in it for a long time seem to have 
 given up all idea of making definite affirmations as to what 
 is right and what is best in connexion with the complicated 
 problem of the welfare of India. I should like, however, 
 just to say this much for myself, that although it is true I 
 have spent only five months in India, I have been for a long 
 time interested in the scientific work that is in progress here. 
 It has been my good fortune in England to have a considerable 
 number of Indian students in the university with which I am 
 connected, and in addition to see a good deal of students 
 taking up the study of science and technology in the other 
 centres in the United Kingdom. 
 
 Now I want this afternoon to tell you very briefly some 
 of the impressions that I have formed and to indicate to you, 
 necessarily also briefly, what I think the position of science 
 1 Address at Bombay University, delivered March 1914 (reported). 
 
8o THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN 
 
 should be in the life of a country such as this. I have found 
 in the province where I spent my time in the first instance 
 a widespread belief that science is a good thing. I have 
 found a great deal of teaching in schools and colleges and 
 increasing tendency to supply such teaching. I know of very 
 notable instances in India of great endowments given to the 
 cause of science, such as the well-known establishment, origin- 
 ally due to the Tata family, in Bangalore, and a similar 
 endowment in Calcutta ; while in Bombay itself there are 
 also striking examples of the generosity of the private citizen 
 as well as of the Government. I have also found in the 
 Punjab a certain amount of research work of a scientific kind 
 in progress by Englishmen and very little indeed by Indians. 
 Then I have also found some very imposing examples of the 
 application of science to public health and agriculture, not 
 only in the Punjab but all over India. 
 
 In addition to these things, if I am to be perfectly frank, 
 I must acknowledge to have observed what I consider to be 
 a good deal of wrong thinking or wrong doing, or not doing 
 at all, that might be rectified by the proper application of 
 science. And lastly, I found here, as I am bound to admit 
 I have found in the West, a very widespread ignorance of 
 what science is and what science can do. 
 
 Now the aims, the methods, the achievements, the functions, 
 and the possibilities of science have been often stated. Through- 
 out the nineteenth century, science by science I mean 
 natural science was really emerging and fighting for its 
 existence ; and incidentally to that fight its claims were 
 frequently stated stated with far greater force and eloquence 
 than I can hope to command, stated not infrequently in a tone 
 of considerable aggressiveness. If you wish to read of what 
 science may be in relation to education you will find no 
 more eloquent, no more complete, I will not say no more 
 perfect, but at any rate no more striking a plea than 
 
INDIAN NATIONAL LIFE 81 
 
 is contained in Herbert Spencer's well-known book on * Edu- 
 cation ', and if you wish to know what science has done and 
 what it may be, how it stands in relation to things intellectual, 
 to things moral, to what in brief we may call culture, you 
 will naturally betake yourself to the writings of Huxley. 
 Other names might be mentioned ; Tyndall, the friend and 
 colleague of Huxley, was a champion in the fight for science, 
 and many minor names may be added to these major ones. 
 
 The fruits of this campaign are abundantly evident to-day. 
 Science in many respects has won its place and acquired its 
 workers. We find ourselves continually being enriched by 
 the fruits of scientific discovery applied to the practical con- 
 veniences of life. We expect regularly gifts from science 
 such as those which produce wireless telegraphy, X-rays, 
 radium, and so forth. And again, we can see the fruits of the 
 campaign to which I have" alluded in the change of thought 
 both in philosophy and in theology. And thirdly, we can 
 see the fruits of the scientific campaign in the evolution of 
 educational institutions, among which I would quote the 
 example already cited by our Chairman, the establishment 
 of what are called the modern universities in the various 
 industrial centres of England. Notwithstanding all this potent 
 evidence, I believe the cause of science needs continual re- 
 stating, because no one who looks into the circumstances 
 can fail to admit that science teaching as an element of 
 general- education is still very greatly neglected, and because 
 amidst the clamour for the introduction of science, and amidst 
 the multitude of counsellors, there is a considerable amount 
 of confusion, and the public gains a wrong notion as to the 
 incidence of science both in education and in the life of the 
 nation. Further than this, it is being stated to-day that the 
 claims which were so enthusiastically put forward for science 
 in the nineteenth century have not been substantiated ; that 
 science arrogated to herself at that time the power to explain 
 
82 THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN 
 
 everything to the world ; and that now she finds that she 
 made a mistake. The claims staked out, it is stated, were 
 extravagant and untenable. 
 
 When I was at Lahore and have been asked to address 
 popular audiences on scientific subjects I have not tried to 
 give what is called a popular lecture on science, for the 
 simple reason that I did not think that I would find an 
 audience that would take a popular lecture on science in a 
 way I wished it to be taken. I was confident that the great 
 bulk of the audience would have to be instructed in the very 
 elements of science, and to attempt this and, at the same 
 time, to give an account of the recent development of science 
 in the space of a single hour is perfectly futile. A popular 
 lecture on science is, therefore, very apt to reduce into a 
 mere tickling of the imagination and a display of imposing 
 experiments ; and to that I declined to stoop. What I have 
 done when I have spoken in India has been to try and 
 illustrate what science really is, by giving some account of 
 the life of a scientific man, and the particular man that I have 
 selected has been the great Frenchman Pasteur. 
 
 In the first place, he was one of the greatest scientific men 
 who ever lived. In the second place, he was the man whose 
 scientific work told in an almost unparalleled degree and 
 with unparalleled rapidity upon the welfare of the human 
 race. In the third place, the work of Pasteur was devoted 
 to fields which are very much the same as those that above 
 all others await cultivation in India; I mean the fields of 
 agriculture and public health. And in the fourth place, the 
 life of Pasteur illustrates not merely the potency of science 
 as an instrument for the amelioration of the lot of humanity, 
 but shows what science at its best really is, not only intel- 
 lectually but philosophically and morally. May I remind you 
 now very briefly of the achievements of this wonderful man ? 
 
 He was born in the year 1833, and after his school days, 
 
INDIAN NATIONAL LIFE 83 
 
 which were undistinguished, he resolved to become a teacher. 
 He then entered the training college at Paris and there 
 manifested his first real interest in science. The subject 
 which secured his interest was one that promised no practical 
 fruit whatever. It was a peculiarity regarding a particular 
 crystalline substance, viz. tartaric acid. By a scientific 
 anomaly relating to this substance Pasteur's curiosity was 
 excited, and he made up his mind to explain the anomaly. 
 In that way he first acquired his training as a scientific 
 investigator in what may be called pure research. In time 
 he obtained his post as a teacher, moving from one place 
 to another until he settled down in the industrial centre 
 of Lille, where he was very soon called upon to give his 
 scientific assistance in connexion with an important industry. 
 The industry which he was called to assist was the manu- 
 facturing of alcohol from beetroot sugar. This is conducted 
 by a process of fermentation. A large manufacturer, whose 
 son attended Pasteur's class, found that fermentation had 
 a way of going wrong and producing an alcohol which was 
 unfit for sale. Pasteur was appealed to. He took up readily 
 the examination of the difficulty and he very soon found 
 what was at its root. He gave his prescriptions. These 
 prescriptions being followed, all difficulty disappeared, and 
 in that way Pasteur had his interest aroused in the phenomena 
 of fermentation. The phenomenon of fermentation up to 
 that time was almost completely unexplored. It was after 
 the birth of Pasteur that it was first recognized that the 
 organism which produced fermentation was really an organism 
 at all. It was realized, about 1836, that the yeast which was 
 always found in fermenting liquor was really a living organism, 
 which, if observed under the microscope, was found to grow. 
 What was its relation to the process of fermentation no one 
 knew. All that was supposed was based on little more than 
 speculation. Pasteur resolved to take up this inquiry and 
 
84 THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN 
 
 very soon satisfied himself that the process of fermentation 
 was connected in some way with the life and growth of 
 yeast plant. And when he, had established that, he had to 
 decide the question as to the access of the yeast to the liquor 
 which underwent fermentation. In many cases it was deliber- 
 ately added. In some cases it was not added. In order 
 to make wine, all that is necessary is to take the grape, 
 crush it, and then the liquor undergoes fermentation and 
 alcohol is produced. Whence comes yeast, no one knew. 
 It was thought it came from nowhere in particular. But 
 Pasteur, early in his career, formed a strong prejudice against 
 the view that living things can come into existence without 
 parentage, and he expected that wherever fermentation 
 occurred the yeast somehow must have come in from outside. 
 The process of fermentation is akin to putrefaction and the 
 connexion between the two was easily discerned by Pasteur. 
 In liquids undergoing putrefaction Pasteur found organisms 
 not unlike those which occurred in fermenting liquor, and 
 studying the process he came to the conclusion that putre- 
 faction, like fermentation, depended upon the access to the 
 liquids of organisms from an outside source. The only other 
 explanation was that the organisms were generated in the 
 liquid within which life did not previously exist. So Pasteur 
 was led to take up the question whether life ever came into 
 existence in the world without parentage, a view which 
 nowadays may seem remarkable and utterly unacceptable, 
 but which in those days, not very remote I am speaking 
 of a time well within my own memory seemed to be almost 
 a matter of course and a matter of no surprise. Then Pasteur 
 began to try and find out whether the germs that cause 
 fermentation and putrefaction came, as he supposed, from 
 outside. And he found that the germs did come from out- 
 side, and so he founded the science of bacteriology. He 
 showed that if means were taken to use materials which in 
 
INDIAN NATIONAL LIFE 85 
 
 the first instance contained nothing living, and to shield from 
 the liquids which are placed in the vessels that are used 
 the access of all germs from outside under those con- 
 ditions neither fermentation, nor putrefaction, nor any change 
 of that kind ever took place. Then Pasteur thought that 
 disease, like putrefaction and fermentation, was probably the 
 work of organisms which had access to the human body. 
 And he began to realize his desire to investigate disease. 
 The first disease that he took up was one that afflicted sheep, 
 known as anthrax or charbon, and Jalso as wool-sorter's disease 
 because it is one which can be communicated to humanity. 
 He very soon found that a new organism was evident in 
 the blood of infected animals"which was not in healthy blood, 
 and by taking blood from these infected animals and inoculat- 
 ing healthy animals with it he was very soon able to prove 
 beyond all doubt that the transmission of the disease from 
 one animal to another depended upon the communication 
 of the germ. 
 
 The next disease was one affecting fowls, and he found 
 the same thing : that in chicken cholera the disease was ac- 
 companied always by the presence in the blood of a germ, 
 which was the means of transmitting the disease to another 
 animal. Then he found out, by what many people would 
 call mere accident the accident that only men of genius can 
 use something very much more important, viz. that if you 
 kept the active germ it lost virulence and after a certain 
 number of days, if introduced into healthy animals, would 
 produce the disease in a mild form. And he found that when 
 an organism of that kind, one whose potency had been 
 weakened, was injected into the healthy animal not only 
 did the animal have a mild attack, but it became immune 
 to the influence of the active organism. He discovered, in 
 fact, the principle of treatment now so well known and so 
 widely practised, that of preventive inoculation or vaccination, 
 
86 THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN 
 
 a method which had been used in connexion with small-pox, 
 but which now was made available for another serious trouble 
 affecting the animal kingdom. These discoveries of Pasteur's, 
 demonstrated as they were by the most carefully collected 
 evidence, did not convince the medical people of his own 
 country. There is deep conservatism in almost all minds 
 and especially in certain intellectual minds, and this con- 
 servatism was extremely evident in the medical profession 
 of France. Pasteur's theories were doubted. His experi- 
 mental results were questioned, and eventually in order to 
 put matters to test a great public trial was arranged and 
 carried out in regard to the disease anthrax, that I have 
 already spoken of as affecting the sheep. This particular 
 trial marks one of the most important epochs in the 
 history of medicine. Sixty sheep were placed at the disposal 
 of Pasteur for trial. Ten of these were put aside and nothing 
 was done to them. Of the remaining fifty, twenty-five were 
 treated with the preventive inoculation ; twenty-five were not 
 so treated. Then the whole fifty, inoculated and non -inocu- 
 lated, were given a dose of active disease germ. Time was 
 allowed to lapse, and then, spectators having gathered from 
 all parts of France, the herds of sheep were examined, and 
 when the appointed day had expired the twenty-five inoculated 
 were in excellent health and the twenty-five non-inoculated 
 were all dead. I cannot go on giving a complete story of 
 P.asteur's life. I merely wish to give an idea of the method 
 by which he was led to attack and solve the problems that 
 lay in front of him in relation to the great pressing needs 
 of humanity in France. These investigations were inter- 
 rupted for a period by Pasteur's being called away to render 
 service in combating another disease affecting silkworms 
 which was threatening to ruin one of the greatest industries 
 of France. The silk industry of France is worth many 
 millions. It was threatened by a peculiar disease which 
 
INDIAN NATIONAL LIFE 87 
 
 affected the whole of Europe, a disease which rendered the 
 silkworm useless for the manufacture of the silk. In one district 
 of France alone over eight million pounds had been lost in 
 fifteen years owing to the ravages of this disease. Pasteur 
 was called in, and although he knew nothing of the industry 
 or the silkworm, and was never engaged in any silk business, 
 yet by the application of his methods he got to the bottom 
 of the trouble and gave a prescription for the remedy. The 
 particular achievement with which Pasteur's name is most 
 associated was the last and in many respects the greatest of 
 his life, that in respect to the treatment of hydrophobia. 
 You happily possess two Pasteur Institutes where anti-rabic 
 treatment can be given and people can be spared from the 
 awful consequences that are too likely to ensue from the bite 
 of a mad dog. I have no time to tell you the stages by 
 which Pasteur achieved this great discovery but I think you 
 will gather from this brief indication of Pasteur's work that 
 you cannot find a better example of the cultivation of science 
 for the welfare of a nation. 
 
 You may say that this is a material view of science. It 
 is no doubt in a sense a material view. But it is a view of 
 science that surely no benevolent person would in any way 
 ignore or belittle. Health, after all, is the first consideration. 
 If you have not got health you cannot have a nation at all, 
 and the direction of science to the subject of public health 
 seems to me to be one of the first calls to which a scientific 
 man should respond. It is possible also to be too censorious 
 about the utilitarian application of science in relation to the 
 practical arts. We are often told truly enough that man 
 cannot live by bread alone. At the same time man must 
 have bread among other things. And a man who, like 
 Pasteur, could rescue a people from industrial destruction is 
 surely rendering a magnificent service to the nation to which 
 he belongs. 
 
88 THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN 
 
 If you want to see science on its more purely material side 
 you can take the German nation. I should like to tell you 
 about the development of science in Germany. You know, 
 no doubt, that at the present time there is no nation in the 
 world which has developed science so thoroughly, which 
 has applied it so closely to national life as Germany. And 
 this has been a very rapid achievement. At the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century Germany was not in any way 
 conspicuous in science. The development took place after 
 the first quarter of the nineteenth century had passed. But 
 since that time it has developed with marvellous rapidity 
 and has produced material results in Germany of the most 
 imposing character. It is really remarkable to read things 
 that were written of Germany so late as 1840. The great 
 Liebig, the person much more than any other who is respon- 
 sible for giving impulse to the teaching of science, in that 
 year published a paper in which he speaks in the most 
 deploring terms of the position of his own science in Prussia. 
 He says that in that time there was not a single teaching labor- 
 atory. The whole enthusiasm of the learning world was for 
 literary and classical studies. He commended science not 
 only for its own sake but for the profits which certainly came 
 through it to national life, and he remarked that 'in fifty 
 years the neglect of science would be looked back upon 
 with incredulity and a smile of pity'. Considering that 
 condition of things it is nothing less than marvellous to 
 regard- the condition of German science to-day. If we take 
 the whole range of science, physical and biological, I think 
 it can be affirmed that there is no country in the world where 
 there is so much activity, so many workers, so much State 
 endowment, and so great an output of publication. It is, I 
 should like to say, the great number of scientific men that 
 is the noteworthy feature. I do not say for a moment that 
 they are greater scientific men than those of other countries. 
 
INDIAN NATIONAL LIFE 89 
 
 The result has been the creation in Germany of a material 
 prosperity which is quite extraordinary. The example that 
 is often quoted is that of the German chemical industry. 
 That industry, developed within a period of half a century, 
 produces a yield of something like fifty million pounds sterling 
 annually. To take one single thing and a striking example 
 of what Germany has done in science in 1897 Germany 
 imported natural indigo of the value of six hundred thousand 
 pounds, and in 1912 she exported artificial indigo of the 
 value of over two millions, and a good deal of it to India ! 
 In Germany there are at the present time probably no less 
 than twenty thousand people being trained in science in the 
 institutions of university rank as against 2,600 in England ; 
 so that whilst the population proportion of the two nations, 
 Germany and England, is 13 to 9, in the highest education 
 the ratios are 13 to rj. There are over 4,000 highly 
 trained chemists employed in German industries. 
 
 Now I have told you perhaps enough about France and 
 about Germany. I must get back to my main theme. It 
 is obvious from the examples I have chosen that the highest 
 science such as that of Pasteur and that of Germany ' pays '. 
 It effects great improvement on things that exist, and from 
 what exists develops great things that are new. I lay stress 
 on this last qualification for a particular reason. There 
 is a belief which is widespread, and to which utterance is 
 sometimes given, that research pure and simple is calculated 
 to produce very great material results. I have read since 
 I came to India, in the Hindustan Reweiv, an article on 
 'Scientific Research in India', which had many merits. But 
 so far as I could read, the paper seems to be fraught with 
 one most serious mistake. The author in one place says, 
 after alluding to one of the greatest workers of the past, 
 ' What urged the scientists to these battles and these victories 
 over nature which have become 'the heritage of the human 
 
 1461 M 
 
9 o THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN 
 
 race? No one of those great investigators from Aristotle 
 to J. J. Thomson, according to the ordinary definition of the 
 word, had any "practical" end in view.' Surely there lies 
 a great misapprehension and a great misstatement there. 
 My reading of scientific history tells me, I won't say exactly 
 the reverse, because there are countless cases of most im- 
 portant scientific work having originated in a simple desire 
 for truth and nothing more. At the same time, if you 
 really look into the history of science you will find that there 
 is a very large proportion of the highest, the most important, 
 the most theoretical science, that has arisen from the effort 
 of science to solve practical problems. Take my own science. 
 Who is the greatest man in chemistry ? I think, with all due 
 regard to patriotism, and with the strongest desire to be fair, 
 one would be obliged to say Lavoisier, whose work revolu- 
 tionized chemistry. What was the beginning of Lavoisier's 
 work ? If you inquire you will find it was the desire to 
 improve the illumination of the streets of Paris. The streets 
 were badly lighted and a prize was offered for improvements. 
 He addressed himself, first of all to the construction of the 
 lamps, to the minute construction of the burners, and matters 
 of a mechanical kind. Then he came to think about the 
 question of oil. From that he found the necessity of 
 understanding the process of combustion, and because oils 
 and other fuels were too complex material for investigating 
 the simplest aspect of combustion, he passed to the investi- 
 gation of the effect of fire upon metals. There he made 
 his immortal discoveries and revolutionized chemical science. 
 Throughout his life he was eager to solve the practical 
 problems which he found in his own environment. . I can 
 give you innumerable examples of the same kind. 
 
 Whilst, therefore, I should be among the last persons, I 
 hope, to say a word against dispassionate, disinterested culti- 
 vatioa of knowledge for its own sake ; while I should be 
 
INDIAN NATIONAL LIFE 91 
 
 among the first to admire the men who have pursued truth 
 as the* hermit pursues piety, I say it should not be forgotten 
 that science applied to the practical problems that call for 
 solution yields an abundant fruit of pure truth. And I go 
 further than that and I say, speaking of a country like this, 
 that the first claim on high science is for research directed 
 to real and urgent national problems. When I landed in 
 this country and took the long journey from Bombay to Lahore, 
 two things were constantly coming to my mind I am now 
 speaking as a chemist agriculture and public health. Are 
 not those the two great scientific interests of this country? 
 When you think of the death-rate and the scourges to which 
 the land is subjected, when you think that they are largely 
 preventable, you will surely admit that the first claim upon 
 science is that it should be directed to the amelioration of 
 such things as these. When you realize that in India nine 
 out of ten are engaged in agriculture, when you see how 
 much of the agriculture of this country is primitive, then 
 surely also one of the first claims made upon science by this 
 country will be the improvement of agriculture. Research 
 will not necessarily create industry. That is a great mistake. 
 It will not do so. It will add to industries already existing. 
 It will give them new life. It will give them expansion and 
 development, but research pure and simple will not immedi- 
 ately create industries, will not call into life occupations that 
 are not already being pursued in some primitive way. 
 
 The only point on which I may touch very briefly, before 
 I conclude, is this, I have had to ask myself since I have 
 been in India what is the value of science teaching that is 
 going on. There is a very great deal of it. Is it the best 
 that could be done ? Is it the right thing ? Is there some- 
 thing else worth doing? Is there any other direction to 
 which the effort might be turned? I do not want to say 
 too much. I hope when I get home to prepare some state- 
 
92 THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN 
 
 ment of a very carefully considered kind upon the subject. 
 But I will say this much, that I have serious misgivings ^.bout 
 a great deal of science that is being taught. It seems to 
 me that there is a great deal of science being taught which 
 is not likely to issue in anything practical or in anything 
 really intellectual. The demand at present in this country 
 for the highest science, the demand for the scientific expert, 
 is limited. It must grow. But I think it will only grow 
 in proportion to the industrial development of the country. 
 You must remember that in my own country science lagged 
 behind industry. Industry reached a high pitch of develop- 
 ment before science was widely taught. The result was 
 that when we began to teach science industries were already 
 waiting for it. But if you attempt at present to train a large 
 number of men in the highest kind of special science in India, 
 I am afraid you will find difficulty in giving them employment. 
 Well then, if that is so, you will wish to do something less. 
 Now how much less would be of value ? My opinion is that 
 the thing that would be most valuable to the country, the 
 thing that is most needed, is the sound teaching of the very 
 elements of science and the dissemination throughout the 
 schools of a realization of what science is and what it can 
 do. Until that knowledge is diffused, until the rising 
 generations of India realize very clearly what science is, 
 what it has done, what it can do, what it may do for this 
 country, the demand will not arise for the highly trained 
 scientist who is to take his place in the development of your 
 industries. Of all the things that I have done at Lahore or tried 
 to do, that which has given me most satisfaction has been 
 a small attempt that I have made to help the science teachers 
 in the schools. And I believe, if I had to prescribe for 
 India the action which I think would tend to the greatest 
 good at the present time, it would be the improvement of 
 science in your schools. Take more trouble in the prepara- 
 
INDIAN NATIONAL LIFE 93 
 
 tion of your teachers, give them facilities for introducing 
 a really humane and human scientific teaching, which at 
 present, I am bound to say, I do not think exists. I have 
 no desire to be censorious. I know that science is still new 
 in this country. But I cannot help thinking that a great 
 deal of the science that is being taught at the present time 
 is of a kind which will not produce the specialist and yet 
 will not imbue the person who receives it with the real notion 
 of what the relation of science is to national life. The thing 
 that I believe most essential for you I do not wish to make 
 it too personal, because it is also true of our own country 
 to a large extent, but it is perhaps more urgently true here 
 is to disseminate the notion of what the potentialities of 
 science really are. 
 
 There is much else connected with science that I should 
 have liked to talk about. There is a philosophical side, and 
 there is the ethical side of science. There is still a tendency 
 to look upon science as a subject that has its dangers. It 
 is apt to be regarded as what we call a bread-and-butter 
 study, a study that lays too much stress upon the material 
 aims of life ; one that by its discipline damages the capacity 
 of a human being for appreciating the value of some of the 
 things that are best and highest in life. I have no time to 
 enter upon a defence of science in this respect. I can do no 
 better than once again refer you to the life of Pasteur. No 
 book that I know of will give you a better idea of what 
 science, properly regarded, is in relation to things, not only 
 material, but to things philosophical and things spiritual, 
 and I think if you read that book you will see that science 
 properly regarded may be acquitted of the charges that are 
 so often laid at its door. I have given you a very imperfect 
 plea for science, and a very imperfect account of its true 
 relation to national life. I do ardently believe in science, 
 and I need hardly say I do ardently believe in the necessity 
 
94 SCIENCE IN INDIAN NATIONAL LIFE 
 
 for its cultivation in this country. For I believe that only 
 in science will you find the intellectual weapons with which 
 you can combat the greatest evils from which this country 
 suffers. I need not enumerate those evils. They are suffici- 
 ently well known to every one who has the interests of India 
 at heart. But health and industry, clear thinking and 
 courageous thinking, and a love of all that is true and good 
 and beautiful, these things, I believe, result from the right 
 pursuit of science. 
 
German Science^ 
 
 NO one can have lived in modern England without hearing 
 continually of the eminence of Germany in science. It 
 is generally supposed that the Germans are much more 
 scientific than we are ; that they believe in science more, 
 study it more, pay for it more ; that they bring it more into 
 the affairs of life ; that they have profited greatly by its 
 application to industry. These beliefs are well founded and 
 just. 
 
 Other opinions that are hardly less current on the subject 
 are not true. For example, I have met frequently with the 
 opinions that the leading men of science in Germany far 
 outdistance our own in ability and achievement, that the 
 working men of Germany are specially equipped with 
 scientific knowledge, that the German school curriculum 
 is highly scientific. None of these things is true. 
 
 It will be my purpose this afternoon to try and give you 
 an idea of the position which science really does occupy 
 in Germany and of the services which its cultivation has 
 rendered to the nation, and I shall briefly describe the state 
 of things in this country, venturing at the same time a little 
 into the region of criticism. 
 
 Any competence that I have to speak to you about German 
 science must be in relation to chemistry, but happily that 
 science is the one in which, perhaps, they are most eminent, 
 the one to which they owe in a special degree material 
 
 1 Anaddress to the Workers' Educational Association, delivered in Leeds 
 July 1913. 
 
96 GERMAN SCIENCE 
 
 prosperity, and one in which their demeanour towards science 
 can be most tellingly illustrated. Let me then briefly indicate 
 to you the history of chemical science in Germany during the 
 last hundred years. 
 
 At the beginning of the nineteenth century Germany was 
 not as conspicuous in chemistry as either France or England. 
 Modern scientific chemistry is dated by Frenchmen with much 
 justification from the time of the great Lavoisier, whose 
 career was tragically ended by the guillotine during the 
 French revolution. Englishmen might be inclined to put 
 their countryman John Dalton in the first position. But 
 no like claim has, so far as I am aware, been made by 
 Germany ; and though undoubtedly the science was cultivated 
 in that land and many valuable discoveries were made there 
 the nation was conspicuous neither by the eminence of its 
 chemists nor by their number. The first commanding figure 
 which appears in the modern history of German chemistry 
 is that of Justus von Liebig. Of him and his services I shall 
 speak directly, but for the moment I mention him as one 
 who has left an authentic account of the state of chemical 
 science in Germany at the beginning of its great epoch. One 
 part of this account, entitled ' The Condition of Chemistry 
 in Prussia V is so interesting and so significant that I will 
 venture to refer to it in some detail. 
 
 Liebig's paper is more of a diatribe than a description. 
 He begins by exclaiming how inexplicable it must be to clear- 
 sighted people that in Prussia, ' a country to which a degree 
 of intelligence and culture is ascribed such as is to be found 
 in few others ', it is the Government itself which has not the 
 most distant idea of the importance of chemistry and that 
 all efforts of the teachers are wrecked by want of recognition 
 on the part of those whose duty it is to provide for and 
 
 1 * Der Zustand der Chemie in Preussen ', published in Liebig's Annalen 
 der Chemie und Pharmacie, vol. xxxiv, p. 47 (1840). 
 
GERMAN SCIENCE 97 
 
 facilitate the progress of science. * The cause of this state 
 of things is, however, not difficult to understand. Most of 
 our statesmen have brought from their youth no impression, 
 no insight in regard to science. There was in their day no 
 real science taught. Chemistry was regarded as the handmaid 
 of medicine, to prepare drugs for the physician. Apart from 
 the pharmacist, the science had no existence. The humanistic 
 studies, languages, have with us at all times had the pre- 
 ponderance. They it is which have imbued a whole nation 
 with vanity and conceit about things which stand in no kind 
 of relation to the organic life of the state.' 
 
 After bitter reflections on the extravagances and pedantries 
 of the learned scholars and the disastrous effect on pupils 
 whose aim becomes merely to ape their masters, Liebig goes 
 on to say : ' Humanistic studies have become not a means 
 of forming the mind, languages not the keys to the thoughts 
 of lofty spirits of the past, but a sort of fetish in themselves. 
 
 ' In the learned German journals you will find that for 
 ninety-nine pedagogical or philosophical essays there is 
 perhaps a single scientific writing. Everybody with any 
 claim to culture understands the ninety-nine, but the science 
 remains a hieroglyph.' He then extols science for the light 
 it sheds on the realm of Nature in which we live, for the 
 impress it makes upon the mind, ' giving a new sense which 
 permits man to discern innumerable wonders which to another 
 remain hidden and invisible.' He recounts the great con- 
 sequences of Newton's discoveries and explains how by the 
 progress of chemistry revolutionary industrial and economic 
 changes have been effected. And yet ' Prussia, a country 
 in the highest state of culture and intelligence, has no place 
 where the physiologist, the geognost, the physician, the 
 industrialist, the physicist, can learn and become familiar 
 with, the language of natural phenomena. In Prussia there 
 exist no chemical laboratories. The youth are debarred 
 
 2461 N 
 
98 GERMAN SCIENCE 
 
 from one of the most attractive, beautiful, and powerful means 
 for the higher culture of the mind. The present and the 
 future generation have no opportunity to instruct themselves in 
 chemistry; the nation cannot attain to the consciousness of its 
 power to reach innumerable new springs of sustenance and 
 profit, for this is only possible by instruction in chemical 
 laboratories.' Liebig refers in detail to these disadvantages, 
 giving almost incredible examples of the lack of science- 
 teaching and of bad science-teaching. Adverting to par- 
 ticular places, he says there is in Berlin no laboratory where 
 instruction can be received, nor in Breslau, nor Konigsberg. 
 In Bonn there is a technological cabinet ; in Greisswald 
 nothing but medical chemistry ; in Halle nothing. The states 
 will provide no subsidies more than sufficient to pay part 
 of the rent or the cost of fuel. The cost, if the student paid 
 the expenses of chemical instruction, would be quite beyond 
 the means of a German ; they might be borne in England or 
 France, ' The solitary man in Prussia from whom practical 
 scientific instruction proceeds, H. Rose, the only one who 
 takes delight and has the talent to make young men into 
 chemists, has an entire lack of means for instruction. His 
 laboratory is a hired place altogether unfit for the purpose 
 assigned to it, of which the Government pays part of the rent ; 
 but he has not a penny towards paying the annual outgoings. 
 If Rose desires to teach more than words he gets no pupils, 
 for the charges are too high. For a long time he gave 
 a course of four hours weekly, but he could give no instruction 
 in the analysis of minerals which involved the slightest cost. 
 Even for what he did he was obliged to sacrifice his whole 
 salary and to add something from his private fortune/ 
 
 Liebig next alludes to the so-called Trade Schools (Gewerbe 
 Schulen) where, as a rule, the teaching is bad, involving no 
 judgement or power of thought ' fit only for day labourers 
 and machines.' ' True scientific education,' he says, ' should 
 
GERMAN SCIENCE 99 
 
 make people receptive for each and every application of it, 
 based on a knowledge of fundamental principles and laws. 
 Nothing is more disastrous than that the single idea of 
 utility should take root in an educational institution and 
 that attempts should be made to convert children at once 
 into soap boilers, brandy distillers, or vitriol makers. These 
 educational follies squander funds without procuring the 
 slightest benefits.' He alludes to the usual attitude of sons 
 of manufacturers who come to him. 'They desire at once 
 to occupy themselves with what they deem to be practical 
 problems, and it is usually with timidity and anxiety that 
 they yield to my advice, put aside all these futile time- 
 frittering attempts, and betake themselves to studying in 
 a fundamental way the art and method of solving purely 
 scientific questions.' He remarks how they wake up to 
 a real enthusiasm for knowledge and how subsequently they 
 find practical applications easy and natural. 
 
 4 This low condition of scientific instruction explains the 
 low level and unscientific character of agriculture, geognosy, 
 pharmacy, &c, Prussia with six universities has no place 
 for training teachers of experimental sciences, the State 
 provides no place where they may have opportunity for 
 acquiring skill and practice in the art of interpreting 
 phenomena and making experiments.' 
 
 * No one can deny,' says Liebig, ' that an overgrown 
 humanism stands above all else against the progress of 
 natural science and scientific medicine, a thing that will 
 be looked back upon half a century hence with shame and 
 a smile of pity.' 
 
 He is, however, far from deprecating a true humanistic 
 training ; he regards it as a necessity and even as the best 
 and most purposeful preparation of the mind for all other 
 studies. * There is no better means of awakening the mind, of 
 sharpening the understanding, and exercising the judgement. 
 
TOO GERMAN SCIENCE 
 
 Mathematics, and natural sciences give to the child a one-sided- 
 ness, to be counteracted fully by linguistic study, first in its form 
 and later by its content in historical and other kinds of 
 knowledge.' 
 
 But the strife of the pedants against science is that of 
 the tallow-chandler against the gaslight, of the innkeeper 
 against the express post, of the courier against canals and 
 railways. ' These dull-witted people, strangers to all true 
 humanity, will not have it that the State shall provide 
 means for the citizen and countryman to clothe themselves 
 better or to bear with ease and affection burdens of the 
 State and pay their dues. They will not have it that 
 the doctor shall visit our universities, that he shall derive 
 true value from our lectures, which remain to him, exclusively 
 trained in the grammar schools, wholly unintelligible. They 
 will not have it that industry and commerce shall develop 
 and enrich the State. They fight against materialism, 
 against the utilitarianism of the time, against phantoms of 
 their own imagination.' And yet it is they on whom the 
 natural sciences have conferred the greatest boon. The 
 benignant influence of science during fifty years has enabled 
 the salaries of these people to be raised threefold without 
 causing oppression, poverty, or discontent among other castes, 
 whom they do not regard as human beings because they 
 understand no Greek nor the variants of the Latin authors. 
 To these same creatures of darkness are we indebted for 
 the fact that our theologians only become acquainted with 
 the goodness and infinite wisdom of the Creator out of 
 books, that our lawyers remain detached from the actual 
 life in a State, from its organic development and completion, 
 that their vision is not sharpened, their mind not awakened 
 to discern what is truly useful or truly harmful. To them 
 we owe it that those curious for knowledge in the country, 
 desiring to understand and to be instructed about natural 
 
GERMAN SCIENCE ^ /.\ \ tt \ 
 
 phenomena, go neither to the priest nor the doctor but to the 
 local forester, because at this'day he knows more real science. 
 Liebig concludes with a eulogy of the policy of the Grand 
 Duchy of Hesse in which his own labours are so warmly 
 favoured by the Government. He prays that the example 
 may be followed, that real schools of science may arise, and 
 that they may develop a new and more peaceful generation, 
 stronger in comprehension and in mind, more receptive for 
 all that is truly great and fruitful. They are to increase the 
 prosperity of the State, for only when man is relieved from 
 the hard struggle for existence and is no more overwhelmed 
 by difficulties, only when it is made easier for him to bear 
 earthly cares, can he direct his mind to higher things. 
 
 Such were Liebig's views of the state of his science in 
 Prussia in the year 1840. 
 
 I now wish to tell you something of Liebig's own work. 
 His name is no doubt familiar to you all in connexion with 
 an extract of meat ! How many, alas ! know of him in any 
 other capacity ? I say ' alas ' because to know Liebig as the 
 sponsor of an extract of meat and to know only that, is like 
 knowing Wellington merely as the founder of Wellington 
 boots or Gladstone as being connected in some way with 
 a particular kind of leather bag. 
 
 Liebig was born in 1803, the son of a dealer and maker of 
 colours. Like so many other distinguished men, he was an 
 unsuccessful and rebellious schoolboy, the real fact being that 
 he had no taste or talent for purely linguistic studies. On an 
 occasion of public reproof he declared amidst the ridicule 
 of his master and class-mates that he would be a chemist. 
 A little later he was sent to an apothecary, but his interest 
 was in chemistry and not in drugs, and after ten months of 
 that life, during which he created constant anxiety by his 
 private experimenting in leisure hours, he was sent back to his 
 
GERMAN SCIENCE 
 
 father. At the age of sixteen he went to the University of 
 Bonn and then to Erlangen, where he studied chemistry as 
 well as the circumstances allowed, and graduated at the end 
 of three years. He had already published an original paper 
 of considerable worth, and through the good offices of friends, 
 his merits having become known in high places, he was 
 furnished by the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt with the 
 means of pursuing his studies. To do this satisfactorily he 
 had to go beyond Germany, and accordingly we find him in 
 1822 at Paris, where, after working for a year in an undis- 
 tinguished laboratory, he was admitted through the influence of 
 his great countryman, Alex, von Humboldt, to one of the most 
 distinguished, that of Gay Lussac. A year later, in 1824, 
 again through Humboldt's influence, he was appointed 
 Professor of Chemistry in the University of Giessen, his age 
 being then 21. He stayed at Giessen for 28 years ; in 1852 
 he became Professor at Munich, where he remained until his 
 death in 1873. 
 
 Of Liebig's scientific work it is impossible within the time 
 at my disposal to give any precise account, and indeed it can 
 hardly be appreciated by those who are not to some extent 
 familiar with chemical science. I may say in a few words 
 that he will always be reckoned one of the greatest chemists 
 of all time, in virtue of the momentous character of his original 
 investigations in pure chemistry. But beyond this, he was the 
 first to extend chemistry in a rational and far-reaching way 
 into agriculture, physiology, and pathology. It was said of 
 him, on his death, ' If we surn^up in our minds all that Liebig 
 did in industries, in agriculture, and in the laws of health, for 
 the good of mankind, we may confidently assert that no man 
 of learning in his course through the world has ever left a 
 more valuable legacy behind him.' Since this was said, another 
 and possibly a greater benefactor, also a chemist, has passed 
 away in the illustrious Frenchman, Louis Pasteur. 
 
GERMAN SCIENCE 103 
 
 There yet remains to record of Liebig the chief service 
 which induces me to lay such stress upon his influence on 
 German science. He was the first man not only in Germany 
 but in the world to found a great school of instruction 
 in experimental chemistry. His laboratory at Giessen and 
 his methods of teaching were the model on which all chemical 
 instruction, and scientific instruction in general, have since 
 been based, and for many years Giessen was the Mecca to 
 which all chemical pilgrims wended their way. It was there 
 that were trained the first great modern teachers of chemistry 
 in Germany, France, and England. When systematic chemical 
 instruction for students was provided in England in the year 
 1845 by the establishment of the Royal College of Chemistry 
 in London, the first professor was one of Liebig's most 
 distinguished pupils, A. W. Hofmann. 
 
 Again we must note that Liebig's laboratory was not a mere 
 mart of knowledge ; it was a centre of inspiration. The study 
 of chemistry was there nothing more or less than the impas- 
 sioned pursuit of truth. He was a teacher among teachers. 
 ' There was ', says Hofmann, ' an earnestness, an enthusiasm in 
 all he said which irresistibly carried away the hearer. Nor was 
 it so much the actual knowledge he imparted which produced 
 this effect, as the wonderful manner in which he called forth 
 the reflective powers of even the least gifted of his pupils. 
 And what a boon it was, after being stifled by an oppressive 
 load of facts, to drink the pure breath of science such as flowed 
 from Liebig's lips what a delight after having, perhaps, 
 received from others a sackful of dry leaves, suddenly by 
 Liebig's lectures to see the living, growing tree ! ' 
 
 * We felt then, we feel still, and never while we live shall we 
 forget Liebig's marvellous influence over us ; and if anything 
 could be more astonishing than the amount of work he did 
 with his own hands, it was probably the mountain of chemical 
 toil he got us to go through. I am sure that he loved us in 
 
104 GERMAN SCIENCE 
 
 return. Each word of his carried instruction, every intonation 
 of his voice bespoke regard ; his approval was a mark of 
 honour, and of whatever else we might be proud, our greatest 
 pride was in having him for a master.' 
 
 Liebig was also a great popularizer of science. His ' Letters 
 on Chemistry', originally contributed to a newspaper and 
 ultimately collected in a volume, probably did more to extend 
 a knowledge of the meaning and possibilities of chemistry 
 among the intelligent public of Germany than anything that 
 has appeared before or since. They dissipated the notion, 
 still lingeriug so strongly and persistently in this country, 
 that chemistry is a remote and mysterious study, which, except 
 in relation to drugs and the making of analyses, has little to 
 yield to material needs and nothing to touch the finer instincts 
 of humanity. 
 
 I think you will understand how the influence of Liebig 
 and his pupils served to permeate Germany with a real sense 
 of the interest and importance of chemical science. Centres 
 of experimental science arose everywhere ; the universities 
 reformed their ways. Those of his pupils who became the 
 heads of industrial concerns found themselves, as he said, with 
 a new point of view, a new attitude of mind, with new weapons, 
 with new means of progress. They came to see that things 
 did not merely happen, that there were unseen but discoverable 
 causes, that a knowledge of causes gave the power of control, 
 of variation, of improvement, of initiation. They had gained 
 all this, not by the narrow pursuit of specialized know- 
 ledge, but by whole-hearted and disinterested study in 
 whatever corner of the unknown they were brought by the 
 master mind of a true philosopher to trace the operation of 
 natural laws and to carry their quest to the utmost inwardness 
 of things. 
 
 It was this conception of science that got about in educated 
 Germany as it has never done in any other country, and it is 
 
GERMAN SCIENCE 105 
 
 on this that German achievements in science and in scientific 
 industry have rested. 
 
 The position of science in the Germany of to-day presents 
 an extraordinary contrast to the state of things discussed and 
 lamented by Liebig. 
 
 So far as pure science is concerned, I will restrict myself to 
 very few words. If we take the whole range of the sciences, 
 biological and physical, I think we may affirm that in no 
 country in the world are there so much activity, so many 
 workers and teachers, so much state endowment, so great 
 an output of publications as in Germany. It is the great 
 number of scientific men and the great volume of their pro- 
 ductions that are the most noteworthy features. 
 
 If you visit the twenty-one German universities you not 
 only find professors of science but you find them surrounded 
 by eager workers, often of mature years, engaged in original 
 investigation, creating a real atmosphere of research. You 
 feel that the great business of the universities is not to retail 
 knowledge but to discover new knowledge and to train young 
 men in the art of discovery. This is very different from our 
 own country, where professors have so much of their time 
 absorbed in teaching or trying to teach pupils the known, 
 rather than training them to explore the unknown, and where 
 in addition they have often to deal with material quite inad- 
 equately prepared and sometimes quite indisposed for higher 
 studies. At the same time I repeat, and I say it emphatically, 
 that it is quantity rather than quality that is the distinguishing 
 characteristic of German science. I do not think that any im- 
 partial person who surveys the history of science during the 
 nineteenth century will affirm that England has been behind 
 Germany, or is behind Germany now, in the quality of her 
 scientific leaders, or that we have been in any degree behind 
 in giving to science those master ideas and fundamental dis- 
 coveries which are the great impulses to advance and which 
 
 2461 O 
 
io6 GERMAN SCIENCE 
 
 fructify in a host of minor discoveries and in countless practical 
 applications. 
 
 We have only to think of Dalton, Young, Davy, Faraday, 
 Joule, Kelvin, Stokes, Darwin, Lyell, Clerk-Maxwell, and 
 Huggins among the giants of the nineteenth century to realize 
 the truth of what I say. And it would be easy to make up a 
 list of those who are with us now that would match the best 
 names of any other country. 
 
 In one branch certainly, in physics, we are not only eminent, 
 we are supreme. Radium, it is true, was discovered by 
 a Polish lady in a French laboratory, but the revolutionary 
 science that has arisen from it, the ideas that have thrown an 
 entirely new and unexpected light on natural phenomena and 
 have opened up a new chapter of science will always be 
 associated primarily with the names of an Englishman, Sir 
 Joseph Thomson of Cambridge, and of a son of Greater 
 Britain a New Zealander, Sir Ernest Rutherford of Man- 
 chester. I am proud to add that in the event of the hour our 
 Professor Bragg stands in the very forefront. 
 
 It is in followers that we are lacking. If a man has it in 
 him to become a great investigator if he has in him the subtle 
 spirit of real genius, he will, we believe, realize himself in the 
 face of most formidable obstacles. He will be there ready to 
 lead and inspire. But if the conditions of the time, the temper 
 of thought, and the influence of the State are detached from him, 
 what is he likely to remain but a prophet crying in the wilder- 
 ness? This has been the plight of most of our English 
 scientific leaders. 
 
 I now wish to say something about German science in 
 relation to industries. Here again I shall be compelled by 
 the limits of my knowledge and experience to confine myself 
 to chemistry, but here again I have to be thankful that 
 chemical science is the one which is most widely applicable to 
 manufacturing processes. 
 
GERMAN SCIENCE 107 
 
 It is difficult to name any industry on which chemistry has 
 not some bearing. The use of fuel, the choice of materials for 
 construction, whether in metal or earthenware, the selection 
 and purification of water for steam-raising and all its other 
 manifold uses, the extraction and refining of metals, the 
 making of alloys, the manufacture, indeed, of every material 
 thing these are all matters on which chemistry has some- 
 thing to say, because chemistry is the science which enables 
 a man to deal intelligently and accurately and economically 
 with all questions that bear on the composition of things. 
 
 There is, I believe, hardly a manufacturing concern of any 
 size in which a chemist, properly trained and properly used, 
 would not be worth a great deal more than his salary. It is 
 equally true that there are just as many in which an ill-trained 
 or misused chemist will be an unprofitable servant. But there 
 are some industries which are in a peculiar degree chemical, 
 and in these Germany has shown herself supreme. 
 
 Of all the material results of German science, the one best 
 known to the English public is the establishment of what is 
 called the Coal-tar industry. Let us glance at that wonderful 
 development. 
 
 The first of the colouring matters now generally known as 
 the aniline dyes was discovered in 1856 by our countryman, the 
 late Sir W. H. Perkin. I need, perhaps, hardly remark that 
 these coal-tar colours or aniline dyes do not occur ready- 
 made in coal-tar, any more than chairs and tables are found 
 in trees. Coal-tar supplies the raw materials from which, by 
 suitable manipulation, the dye-stuffs are elaborated. When 
 Perkin, at the age of eighteen, discovered mauve he was 
 acting as assistant to Professor Hofmann, that pupil of Liebig 
 to whom I have already alluded as having been the first 
 professor in a real professional chemical laboratory in England. 
 The aim of the researches in which Perkin was engaged was 
 purely scientific. He had no intention of turning his chemistry 
 
io8 GERMAN SCIENCE 
 
 to manufacturing ends. But here, as is so often the case in 
 science, aiming at the moon a man hits something terrestrial. 
 Perkin discovered mauve, and thinking it might perhaps serve 
 as a dye he submitted it to Pullar's of Perth who replied, ' If 
 (with an emphasis on the 'if') your discovery does not make 
 the goods too expensive, it is decidedly the most valuable that 
 has come out for a long time.' 
 
 Upon receiving this reply, Perkin decided to take out 
 a patent and begin the manufacture. His father, as he 
 relates, nobly risked his capital in the enterprise, and after 
 many difficulties and anxieties had been outlived, the works 
 were set up at Greenford Green and mauve supplied to the 
 silk dyers in December 1857. 
 
 The discovery of mauve by Perkin was followed by that of 
 magenta on the part of a Frenchman, Verguin, and then came 
 a rapid succession of new colours. The initial difficulties of 
 devising methods of manufacture in a new industry, in con- 
 quering prejudices and accustoming the public to a new 
 thing, had been overcome by Perkin, and now the way was 
 easy to his successors. 
 
 The prejudices of the time were strong, and they remain 
 with us to this day ; everything that could be urged to the dis- 
 advantage of the new colours was of course loudly proclaimed, 
 not only by those who had strong vested interests in the 
 natural dye-stuffs, but by that great national reserve of opinion 
 which is always ready to condemn a new thing because of its 
 newness because it is 4 new-fangled '. 
 
 The first coal-tar colours that were made were no doubt 
 rather of the showy and glaring kind ; some of them also were 
 not very fast either to light or to washing ; some of them 
 were apt to be contaminated with arsenic. It was easy, 
 therefore, to get up a cry against them. The cry was loud 
 and it has been long. There are fugitive dyes among both 
 the natural and the artificial products, but to-day it can be 
 
GERMAN SCIENCE 109 
 
 said emphatically that we have artificial colouring matters 
 * to produce almost any shade with any desired degree of fast- 
 ness on any kind of material, whether it be wool, cotton, silk, 
 or paper'. The idea that artificial colours are necessarily 
 either gaudy or fleeting is quite fallacious. If evidence is 
 wanted it can be supplied by such facts as these, given by 
 Dr. Duisberg, that in the great Gobelin tapestry factory at 
 Paris, where it takes nearly a year to make a square yard of 
 material, costing about 200, the older dye-stuffs have to 
 a considerable extent been displaced by the artificial ones for 
 the sake of their greater fastness to light. Certain blue dyes 
 discovered in 1901 are authoritatively declared to be the 
 most indestructible colours known. 
 
 Perkin's colour factory near London grew and prospered. 
 In 1868 the abstruse researches of two German chemists gave 
 another great impulse by the discovery of the chemical nature 
 of madder the famous * Turkey red '. This was followed by 
 the discovery of a practicable method of making the colour. 
 In a short time the cultivation of madder root began to die 
 out, in thousands of acres in France madder growing gave 
 place to the cultivation of the sugar beet, and the manufac- 
 ture of alizarine (for so the artificial madder was called) grew 
 apace. At this point the necessity of enlarging his manu- 
 factory to cope with the increased trade led Perkin to retire. 
 He had always vowed that the lure of industry with its golden 
 guineas should never detach him from the joy of scientific 
 investigation, and so in 1873 he sold his works. From that 
 time till his death. in 1907, he continued, happy in his labora- 
 tory, to enrich science with his discoveries. He left behind 
 him an honoured name and happily also distinguished sons 
 who have continued in the footsteps of their illustrious father. 
 One of them, I am happy to say, exercises his talents within 
 our own university. 
 
 In addition to Perkin's factory, others arose in London and 
 
no GERMAN SCIENCE 
 
 also in Lancashire. It is a remarkable fact that in the middle 
 of the nineteenth century, the idea of applying science to 
 manufacture was more prevalent in certain parts of Britain 
 and certain sections of British industry than in any other part 
 of the world, and it was easier for a German chemist to find 
 a place in England than in his own country. This is well 
 shown by a fact of great and almost tragic interest namely 
 that there were then in works round about Manchester three 
 German chemists who subsequently returned to their own 
 country and became the leading spirits in three of the vast 
 concerns in Germany at which we now stand in such amaze- 
 ment. 1 
 
 The return of these men to Germany and also the trans- 
 ference in 1 864 of Hofmann from London to Bonn and then 
 to Berlin are considered to have exercised a decisive influence 
 on the development of the coal-tar industry. The new 
 industry, it must be remembered, was new in a very wide 
 sense. Not only were new things made, but they were made 
 by methods of manufacture which depended much less on 
 inventiveness and the kind of practical skill in which the 
 Englishman excels, than on an elaborate and thorough compre- 
 hension of deep science. In this respect Germany was more 
 favourably situated for the development of the industry than 
 England. Liebig's labours, and the labours of others who 
 followed his lead, had brought into existence in Germany an 
 army of young, enthusiastic, and highly capable chemists who 
 were eager for an opportunity of turning their powers to 
 practical use. 
 
 The German industry of preparing pure chemicals, one 
 requiring knowledge and methods akin to those required for 
 
 1 One of these men informed me in the course of conversation a few years 
 ago that he had left England because the firm with which he was engaged 
 showed so much reluctance to support the scientific work he deemed 
 essential for the impending industrial developments. 
 
GERMAN SCIENCE ui 
 
 the colour industry, also gave an advantage. In other respects, 
 the absence of raw material and of large-scale chemical manu- 
 facture of such things as vitriol and soda, Germany was at 
 a great disadvantage. 
 
 I cannot attempt here to trace the progress of events in any 
 detail. Suffice it to say that before long the colour industry 
 had taken firm root in Germany and had begun a growth 
 which has been nothing less than stupendous, and has placed 
 the nation far before any other in this branch of the practical 
 arts. 
 
 Altogether more than 2,000 distinct coal-tar colours have 
 been put on the market and the number is constantly being 
 added to. I can attempt no survey of them and I will only 
 allude to one more in detail, namely indigo. 
 
 Most people know, I think, that indigo is a blue colouring 
 matter of great permanence obtained from a plant which has 
 been cultivated to a very great extent in India and used from 
 very early times. The value of the indigo exported from 
 India in a year has amounted to 3,000,000. 
 
 The preparation of this colour artificially from coal-tar 
 naturally soon became a hope and aim of the new industry. 
 The chemical nature of the substance was elucidated after 
 much labour, and in 1884 Liebig's successor in Munich, von 
 Baeyer, prepared it artificially. It soon appeared on the 
 market, but did not achieve commercial success. Undaunted 
 by this the German chemists and technologists continued 
 their efforts, and only after more than fifteen years of pro- 
 digious labour and the expenditure of vast sums of money, 
 roundly stated at a million sterling, was success finally achieved. 
 It was a wonderful display of talent and enterprise; it has 
 involved incidental discoveries and industrial innovations of 
 great consequence, and is probably as fine an example as 
 could be cited of the triumph of scientific skill intensively 
 directed to a manufacturing enterprise. In 1 897, when Germany 
 
ii2 GERMAN SCIENCE 
 
 began to manufacture artificial indigo, she imported the natural 
 product to the value of 635,000. In 1911 the import had 
 fallen to 22,000, i.e. $, whilst in 1912 Germany exported 
 her artificial indigo to the value of over 2,000,000. I need 
 hardly say that throughout all this time there have been 
 plenty of voices, especially in this country, declaring that 
 artificial indigo could never equal and never replace the 
 ' good old-fashioned ' natural product, and that our appre- 
 hensions about a great industry in our Indian dependency 
 were quite uncalled for. These people are now faced by facts 
 that could have been foreseen by any intelligent student of 
 the past. 
 
 It is not unusual to hear the coal-tar industry referred to as 
 if it only related to the manufacture of dyes. This, however, 
 is a great mistake. It has gathered round it a great variety 
 of collateral manufactures of the utmost importance to phar- 
 macy, agriculture, photography, and many other practical 
 arts. It is a sort of central region of enterprise for a host of 
 scientific industries and comprises a standing army of industrial 
 pioneers armed with the finest weapons that science can forge. 1 
 
 I think there can be no doubt that the development of the 
 coal-tar industries in Germany has had a far-reaching effect 
 on the national attitude towards science, and particularly in 
 this respect that it formed a gigantic object lesson as to the 
 industrial value of what is called pure science. It must be 
 remembered that the chemists from whose researches these 
 great industries arose were in the first instance men working 
 at scientific investigation in a perfectly disinterested way; 
 they were such men as might fitly be described by terms, 
 which in the mouths of unsympathetic practical men are often 
 
 1 This statement has of course been literally verified during the war, for 
 it has been in these works that the Germans have improvised their manu- 
 facture of explosives under blockade and have elaborated the manufacture 
 of poison gas. 
 
GERMAN SCIENCE 113 
 
 meant to be disparaging; they were primarily philosophers 
 and theorists. The industries were related in a particularly 
 clear way to abstruse science ; they arose suddenly and un- 
 mistakably out of scientific laboratories. Compare them, for 
 example, with some other industry, such as glass manufacture. 
 Glass manufacture did not arise from scientific investigations ; 
 it grew from primitive times and evolved gradually in the 
 hands of practical men. Its connexion with science is not 
 apparent ; people do not readily believe that it is as much 
 a chemical operation as is the most high-sounding experi- 
 mental transaction in a university laboratory ; just as they 
 cannot believe that water is as much and as truly a ' chemical ' 
 as is Para-amido-benzene-azo-ortho-oxy-benzoic acid. 
 
 Whilst therefore it might be difficult, and it usually is 
 difficult, to persuade a manufacturer of glass that a man 
 trained in high science is likely to be a profitable ally, there 
 could be no such doubt in connexion with the coal-tar in- 
 dustries. The consequence was that these new German works 
 made a constant demand on the very ablest, the most ardent 
 philosophers among university students of chemistry. 
 
 I think you will agree that if we had to convert a stiff- 
 necked generation of industrialists to a belief that science, 
 even of the most forbidding aspect, is worth consideration as 
 what is called a business proposition, the most persuasive 
 eloquence could hardly equal in effect the spectacle of a group 
 of industries with a capital of twenty-five millions openly 
 declaring that they were made and sustained by high science, 
 all of them paying a steady dividend of something like twenty- 
 five per cent. I believe that as a matter of fact the influence 
 of such a state of things in Germany has been most potent. 
 It is true, no doubt, that before the coal-tar industries arose 
 there was in Germany a disposition to encourage the study of 
 science for its own sake, there was a disposition to associate 
 it with industry ; but such tendencies have been greatly 
 
1 14 GERMAN SCIENCE 
 
 exalted and encouraged by what has happened in these 
 specially chemical industries. 
 
 Be that as it may, the spectacle of German industry to-day 
 discloses an intimacy and degree of association between 
 science and practice such as the world has never seen, and 
 such as is not yet approached in any other country. 
 
 So much then for the coal-tar industry. I have dwelt upon 
 it because it represents the most conspicuous German success 
 among manufactures which depend upon the appreciation and 
 application of science. 
 
 It must not be supposed that it is the only example that 
 could be adduced. On the contrary, it is only one of many, 
 and, indeed, it might have been more instructive if I had 
 chosen some other industry with which we are more familiar 
 in this country to show how, by the application of science, the 
 Germans have succeeded not only in making themselves in- 
 dependent of nations to which they formerly looked for their 
 supplies, but have gone further and proved themselves success- 
 ful rivals as manufacturers for the outside world. One hears 
 the alarm sounded on every side, and even in industries in 
 which we have been inclined to feel a natural and unassailable 
 pre-eminence, authoritative opinion now gives us reason to 
 abandon our complacency. 
 
 I desire to speak with moderation and with all due reserve. 
 I am well aware that a man of science is not entitled to 
 dogmatize about industrial affairs. I am well aware that men, 
 impressed by the successes which have followed the application 
 of science to industry, tend to underestimate other factors of 
 success. Nor am I disposed to repine about British industry. 
 I see many signs of vigour and enterprise. The statistics of 
 trade are wonderful. I know too that there is a constant and 
 rapidly increasing tendency to apply science to industry in 
 this country. And yet, when every allowance is made, I 
 think it may be affirmed with the utmost confidence that 
 
GERMAN SCIENCE 115 
 
 German industry, taken as a whole, exhibits a vastly greater 
 and more effective application of science than our own. 
 
 It will be obvious to you that my account of science in 
 Germany has been very partial and imperfect. The whole 
 subject is, of course, far too large for one man and one hour. 
 I have chosen to speak of the science with which I have some 
 acquaintance. But I believe I am warranted in saying of all 
 science, that there exists in Germany the same regard for it 
 as for chemistry. It is believed in for its own worth as 
 knowledge ; it gains the suffrages of the people and abounding 
 support from the State. It is regarded as the ally and not 
 the enemy of practice, and it is turned to practical account 
 zealously in every way for the furtherance of material well- 
 being. 
 
 Things are by no means so in England. We have, as I 
 have said, no lack of scientific genius. We have, and have 
 had, great men who initiate, men whose discoveries mark 
 epochs in the progress of scientific knowledge, men often 
 more celebrated in Germany than they are here. Many of 
 the ideas for the application of science to industry have come 
 from Englishmen, many of the industrial applications have 
 begun here. But the belief in science either for its own value 
 or for its material usefulness is greatly lacking. 
 
 Science in Britain derives splendid support from certain 
 units and sections of the manufacturing world, but, broadly 
 speaking, the manufacturing world is not behind it and does 
 not use it as it might. I dislike nothing more than from my 
 position inside a university to seem to 'speak disrespectfully 
 of our leaders of industry. It is apt to be resented and it may 
 do more harm than good, but it is sometimes a duty to be 
 disagreeable, and I feel I should be keeping something back 
 that you are entitled to hear if I did not tell you that it has 
 happened repeatedly to me in my life to see individual in- 
 dustrial undertakings languish and sink when they might 
 
 P 2 
 
u6 GERMAN SCIENCE 
 
 have been saved by the knowledge and guidance that science 
 could have supplied. It is difficult to substantiate such a 
 statement, impossible, of course,, to adduce the very instances. 
 But I do not make the statement lightly or hastily. It 
 expresses what is to me not a mere surmise but something as 
 certain as anything can be that from its nature cannot be 
 absolutely proved. 
 
 If I am asked to go to the root of matters and say what I 
 really believe it is that has underlain English neglect of science, 
 I am afraid I should enter into regions where my cause might 
 be better served by silence than by speech. I will therefore 
 tell you frankly that I will not say all that is in my mind. 
 There is a tacit understanding among the teachers of our 
 university, and I believe it is a very wise one, that we put 
 some restraint upon the public expressions of our purely 
 personal opinions. But this much I may say freely, that the 
 pursuit of science in this country has been subject to uneasy 
 suspicion. Of the forms of suspicion I will only mention two. 
 
 I daresay some of you may know that in the University of 
 Oxford an honour student of natural science is commonly 
 known among other sections as ' a stinks man '. It is, of 
 course, a playful term, which it would be ridiculous to take 
 seriously. At the same time there is many a true word 
 spoken in jest, and much serious opinion may be concentrated 
 in words that can be given to a child to lisp. I do not be- 
 lieve that the terse expression to which I have referred was 
 invented by an undergraduate. I think it much more prob- 
 able that it came as a bright inspiration to some prodigiously 
 learned don and was quietly dropped by him in some under- 
 graduate's room. If I do not know the very don in question, 
 I know his double, nay, his centuple. 
 
 What I mean is this, that science as commonly taught, as 
 commonly pursued in this country has not seemed edifying to 
 the man of letters ; and the man of letters, until these later 
 
GERMAN SCIENCE 117 
 
 days, has been the supreme influence in the great seats of 
 learning, that have dominated our education and have trained 
 the leaders of our national affairs. 
 
 I say that the man of letters has not found science edifying. 
 I have often heard him say with extraordinary composure that 
 he knew nothing at all about it, much in the same way that the 
 best-dressed aristocrat in the House of Commons once ex- 
 plained in the course of a debate, that he had never been an 
 agricultural labourer. Science has not gained the regard of 
 the man of letters not only because of the suspicion that it 
 would tend to divert people from literary studies, to which, 
 rightly enough, he attaches vast importance ; but because the 
 thing in itself has not seemed to confer much benefit on the 
 human mind or the human spirit, however far its applications 
 might minister to material well-being. 
 
 Now I do not quarrel altogether with this point of view. 
 It is perfectly true, in the first place, that science has had to 
 adopt an aggressive attitude. It has had to struggle and to 
 fight against tremendous obstacles for recognition not merely 
 as a worthy but as a legitimate subject of study. It has had 
 constantly to assail deep-rooted prejudices and trench on 
 vested interests, and so what is naturally a peaceful pursuit 
 became associated with the idea of idol-smashing and aggres- 
 sion. Besides this, it is only fair to admit that science has 
 been taught and practised by multitudes of people in this 
 country in a truly unedifying way, and bad science is, I think, 
 the most unprofitable mental food that can be administered in 
 the name of knowledge or culture to any human being. A 
 man may outlive a diet of tough irregular verbs, hard-boiled 
 literature, unleavened history, and philosophical dish-water, 
 and yet become a speaker of languages, a lover of books, 
 a student of the vital past and a reflective inquirer into the 
 operations of the mind. Later experience of the realities of 
 life may in these things beget a clearer vision and give a new 
 
n8 GERMAN SCIENCE 
 
 and better standpoint from which a man may begin his studies 
 afresh. But machine-taught science, such as our universities, 
 especially that of London, have condoned, and such as the 
 happily defunct agency of the Government Science and Art 
 Department spread like a plague through our schools that, 
 a man does not recover from easily if at all. For science is 
 not taught by experience of life ; only the want of it is made 
 evident ; and it cannot be gained by taking thought and sit- 
 ting down in leisure hours to read a book. Science can only 
 be learned in laboratories, and if that opportunity has been 
 lost or vainly used in early life it does not ordinarily recur. 
 
 How often does not one come across a man who says ' Oh 
 yes, I was taught some science at school sulphuric acid H., 
 SO 4 or was it H 2 O ? but, of course, I have forgotten all 
 about it.' It has gone, forgotten, unhonoured and unsung 
 not deeply regretted. It never was a reality it was attached 
 to nothing interesting, nothing human. It could not grow ; 
 it could only wither and die. 
 
 I do not wonder, therefore, that science has made such 
 little appeal to the sympathies of men of letters ; it has so 
 often seemed to be nothing and to come to nothing, towards 
 endowing a man with knowledge, taste or talent of any value. 
 
 But I think that science has been suspected even when it 
 has been good that is to say, when it has been so well 
 studied and practised, that it has been an unmistakable addi- 
 tion to the resources of the mind, when it has become productive 
 in new knowledge, when it has opened new vistas and made 
 almost incredible intellectual conquests in the realm of Nature. 
 
 There is a widespread belief, more often hinted than openly 
 declared, that the pursuit of science is accompanied by the 
 development of habits of mind and tendencies of practice 
 which would derogate from the most precious elements in 
 human nature and in the amenities of human society. 
 
 This is an old theme on which much has been said and 
 
GERMAN SCIENCE 119 
 
 much has been written, in comparison with which any words 
 of mine must sink into insignificance. It is the fashion to 
 pretend that the belief exists no longer. Science, it is said, 
 has gained the day ; it is the modern study ; it is the one 
 towards which money is most freely devoted. This is only 
 partly true. The support that science has received in these 
 later times is, I am afraid, not in the wide sense disinterested. 
 It is believed that science pays. And so it does, and so it 
 may be commended. As citizens of a country that we desire 
 shall survive, we who pursue science are anxious enough that 
 it shall be known to pay. But we want much more than that. 
 We want science to be appreciated for its own sake. And I 
 boldly say, it is not so appreciated by any manner of means. 
 I say it is distrusted. If you ask for proof, I might reply 
 that it lies in the constant experience of my life. If you insist 
 upon a sample, here is one. At the conclusion of a very able 
 article appearing not long ago in a newspaper on the subject 
 of London University, we find the following : 
 
 * The report is a masterly production, and if we disagree 
 with it on the points indicated, it must be admitted that it 
 errs in conformity with a tendency characteristic of the age 
 the tendency to close unrecognized doors, straighten roads and 
 regulate everything in a " scientific " spirit a tendency which 
 may ultimately have very much to answer for.' 
 
 The word scientific is in inverted commas. That I take to 
 mean that it is not used in the right sense, as The Times puts 
 General in inverted commas when it speaks of * General ' Booth. 
 
 Please understand that I do not quarrel with what I have 
 quoted. On the contrary, I believe it is entirely in harmony 
 with my own view namely, that the common and wrong 
 idea of science is that of something rigid, mechanical, un- 
 imaginative, and something cramping to the human spirit. 
 Science may be this if it is misconceived and misused ; it may 
 tend to make a man or a nation narrow and one-sided, blind 
 to other things as great as or greater than itself. But so, 
 
GERMAN SCIENCE 
 
 surely, may be, and has been the case, with the pursuit of purely 
 literary studies. 1 
 
 Of all the distinctions that -I dislike, none seems more 
 misleading than that of calling literary studies the 'Humanities '. 
 It leads almost inevitably to the inference that the rest of 
 knowledge consists of inhumanities. I would not say a word 
 of disrespect for the so-called humanities, for I have no dis- 
 respectful thought concerning them as I conceive they should 
 be, and as they really are apart from pedants. The proper 
 study of mankind may be man ; and human history, the 
 human wisdom of our forefathers, human piety and human 
 poetry, the study of the human mind, will always have their 
 assured place. But outside man stands the rest of Nature, 
 the Universe. The exploration of that, the unravelling of all 
 the phenomena of the Heavens and the Earth, the revelation 
 of natural law that was before man was, that will remain when 
 man may well have ceased to be that surely is a study 
 which should not be belittled by any exclusive term. That 
 surely is not a study which, properly conceived and properly 
 pursued, will make a man -or a people arrogant, mechanical, 
 unimaginative or impious. The time I think may come when 
 everyone who now rightly thinks himself in darkness if he has 
 not some love or knowledge of the humanities, will be not any 
 less ashamed to be heedless or ignorant of the natural sciences, 
 which, if it is desired to denote them by a single word, might, 
 I think, without any impropriety be called the divinities. 
 
 The danger of science undoubtedly lies in the rich material 
 fruits that it inevitably sheds in its luxuriant growth. These 
 are a temptation to the carnal mind, and I would say as soon 
 as anyone, Woe be to the man or to the nation that sets its 
 heart on these alone ! 
 
 Such a danger may be said to exist in modern Germany, 
 
 1 It cannot be too emphatically stated that the school discipline of 
 Germany was not based on scientific studies. (January 1921.) 
 
GERMAN SCIENCE 121 
 
 I do not know. Certainly it is felt by some people. I gave 
 you at the outset of this address some quotation from the 
 writings of Liebig when in 1840 he lamented the national 
 disregard of science. To this it is only fair to set in contrast 
 some modern utterances made sixty years later by men not 
 less devoted to the interest of their country : 1 
 
 * Two souls dwell in the German nation ', writes Professor 
 Paulsen ; ' the German nation has been called the nation of 
 poets and thinkers, and it may be proud of the name. To-day 
 it may again be called the nation of masterful combatants, as 
 which it originally appeared in history.' 2 That is true, but 
 an addition is needful, for the struggle to which Germany has 
 since 1860 devoted its undivided strength is not a struggle 
 waged consciously in the name and for the sake of civilization, 
 is not a struggle for intellectual or political ideas, or ideals of 
 any kind, but a struggle for sheer mastery in the realm of 
 matter and for political ascendancy amongst the nations. Yet 
 if Germany should ultimately gain all the material success 
 and political power it aspires after, no one will dare to say 
 that it will mean more for civilization and the world than the 
 weak and disjointed Germany of a century ago, which gave to 
 mankind the Goethe and Schiller, the Kant and Fichte whose 
 teachings have for the time been cast aside. 
 
 ' One recognizes with anxious apprehension ', says another 
 writer, 3 * that the active interest for natural science and 
 technical improvements is not balanced by a deeper concern for 
 the problems of the mental sciences and the arts, which, in 
 truth, can alone beneficially appropriate the achievements of 
 technical culture ; that in every department of German life 
 a tendency to be satisfied with externals is visible, and the 
 
 1 I make these quotations from the well-known work ' The Evolution 
 of Modern Germany', by Mr. W. H. Dawson (Fisher Unwin, 1908). 
 
 2 Zur Ethik und Politik, p. 59. 
 
 3 Unser Kaiser und sein Volk, by a * Schwarzseher' (' Pessimist '), 
 p. 155. 
 
122 GERMAN SCIENCE 
 
 endeavour after knowledge and self-realization is lacking ; 
 that we have, indeed, made progress in the domain of in- 
 dustry, commerce, and material life, but, on the other hand, 
 the old German quality of.striving after the essence of things, 
 the hidden soul of phenomena, and the delight in this en- 
 deavour free from all secondary ends is more and more 
 being lost ; that we have lost the old idealism and in its place 
 have put phrases and pomposity and high-sounding words.' l 
 
 ( A one-sidedness which only esteems material values and an 
 increasing control over nature is destructive in its influence/ 
 wrote Professor Dr. Rein, of Jena, recently, ' and this one-sided- 
 ness set in during the second half of the nineteenth century 
 in Germany. We Germans have ceased to be the nation of 
 thinkers, of poets, and dreamers, we aim now only at the 
 domination and exploitation of nature . . . Have we Germans 
 kept a harmonious balance between the economic and the 
 moral side of our development, as was once the case with 
 the Greeks ? No ; with the enormous increase of wealth dark 
 shadows have fallen on our national life. In the nation as in 
 the individual we see with the increase of wealth the decrease 
 of moral feeling and moral power.' 
 
 'At the beginning of the nineteenth century/ writes Pro- 
 fessor Paulsen, of Berlin, than whom no one has more right to 
 speak upon this subject, ' speculative philosophy was in the 
 ascendant, and with it went humanistic philology, both being 
 one in that their aim was contemplation. At the end of the 
 century natural science was predominant, and natural science in 
 the service of technics and medicine. One has only to notice 
 the increase of technical colleges and the expenditure which 
 the State incurs on behalf of science ; for new institutes 
 of natural science and medicine, new millions are always ready, 
 but is any liberality shown towards the most modest need of 
 philology or philosophy ? ' 2 
 
 1 Unser Kaiser undsein Volk, by a ' Schwarzseher ' (' Pessimist '), p. 155. 
 
 2 Zur Ethik und Politik, p. 62. 
 
GERMAN^ SCIENCE 123 
 
 A consideration of German science leaves us with much to 
 honour and admire and much to muse upon. I have found 
 a great tendency on the part of those who have come fresh from 
 its atmosphere, ardent with the enthusiasm of youth or with the 
 impatient and unreflective zeal of hasty reformers a great 
 tendency to insist that we should forthwith Germanize our 
 science. I hope profoundly that we shall do no such thing. 
 I will only name one direction in which, I think, we are 
 already showing that we are wiser and may do better. The most 
 conspicuous educational outcome of the German scientific and 
 industrial movement has been the establishment of their 
 technical universities, so often extolled both in Germany and 
 here. I would like to say frankly I consider technical univer- 
 sities to be-an educational mistake and a national danger of the 
 first magnitude. Efficient they may be within a particular 
 range of human efficiency, but universities, it must be remem- 
 bered, are the dominating influence in national education. It 
 is in them that the greatest number of minds which will control 
 the nation are tutored. The ideals that are fostered there 
 will be carried out into the world and impressed upon the 
 national life. Will anyone maintain that great institutions, 
 given over entirely to the teaching of science and especially of 
 science in relation to purely material ends, will form an environ- 
 ment in which the leaders of the working world may be best 
 prepared to serve their time and generation ? 
 
 There is surely no more mischievous idea than that a uni- 
 versity should be a place where a man is fashioned into an 
 efficient piece of mechanism, where he is made simply clever, 
 and is sent out to be accurately fitted like a cog-wheel in what 
 is sometimes called the machinery of civilization. It is 
 a desolating doctrine of education and a godless view of life. 
 
 When we hear our great men such a man, for example, as 
 Lord Morley speak so tenderly and reverently of Oxford, 
 do you suppose that he is thinking of it as a place where he 
 learnt political economy or history or literature ? By no means. 
 
124 GERMAN SCIENCE 
 
 He thinks of it as a temple of disinterested learning, a place 
 haunted by the spirits of mighty men, the place where the 
 flower of English youth assembled, young men with different 
 destinies, different hopes, different ideals, who got to kno\v 
 one another, influenced and stimulated one another, where 
 character was formed and strengthened, aspirations gained, and 
 the whole man influenced for good service in the world. 
 
 My praise of our old universities is always qualified. I 
 believe they sadly neglected their duty to science, that they al- 
 lowed themselves to grow much too aloof from the work-a-day 
 world and the occupations that engage the bulk of our people. 
 
 The new universities are relatively small, and they cannot 
 claim yet to have in any great measure the greatest virtues of 
 the old. But in their closer association with the industrial 
 world they have, I believe, an enormous advantage. The 
 University of Leeds is often spoken of as a technical univer- 
 sity. It is no such thing. It is a university in which those who 
 are engaged in literary, scientific and technical studies dwell 
 together in union and harmony. We set out deliberately to 
 avoid one-sidedness, we seek to gather together a community 
 of all interests, and we believe that in our mutual influences we 
 shall preserve a fair balance ; that we shall produce neither the 
 literary pedant, too superfine to sympathize with the realities 
 of life, nor the narrow scientific technologist with a view of 
 knowledge limited to the service of material ends. 
 
 In this way I think we shall do better than Germany, and 
 whilst cultivating science, shall avoid its detachment and in- 
 tensive cultivation for practical ends apart from other realms 
 of knowledge. We shall keep its votaries sane, large-minded 
 and in sympathy with all that is worthy and elevating to the 
 human spirit, and make them better able to gauge and meet 
 the complex and varied needs of a nation striving not only for 
 greater prosperity but for truer civilization. 
 
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