selves with subjects far removed from the ordinary affairs of life; they may be tolerated, but they are not to be encouraged. But now that biting flies have been shown to be responsible for the transmission of a number of terrible diseases, knowledge which was considered quite useless has proved to be of the greatest importance. There could not be a better illustration. of the ultimate value of faithful scientific work. Take this lesson to heart; whatever is worth doing is worth doing well. Every addition to knowledge is a steppingstone by which the human race can pass to new regions of discovery. Science asks not for words, but work; for the patient study of the things before us rather than for dreams and vague speculations. Listen to the trumpet-call of a naturalist and philosopher, whose labours for many years Ito search out the secrets of nature by the way of experiment" have made life happier and surer in many parts of the world:

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We must not accept any speculations merely because they now appear pleasant, flattering, or ennobling to us. We must be content to creep upwards step by step, planting each foot on the firmest finding of the moment, using the compass and such other instruments as we have, observing without either despair or contempt the clouds and precipices above and beneath us. Especially our duty at present is to better our present foothold; to investigate; to comprehend the forces of nature; to set our State rationally in order; to stamp down disease in body, mind, and government; to lighten the monstrous misery of our fellows, not by windy dogmas, but by calm science. Sir Ronald Ross.

CHAPTER IX

SCIENTIFIC MOTIVE

No man ever had genius who did not aim to execute more than he was able. Sir Humphry Davy.

The pleasure of life is according to the man who lives it, not according to the work or place. Emerson.

It is no paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications. Prof. A. N. Whitehead.

Scientific subjects do not progress necessarily on the lines of direct usefulness. Very many applications of the theories of pure mathematics have come many years, sometimes centuries, after the actual discoveries themsleves. Prof. A. R. Forsyth.

In all cases, the structure, habits, instincts, and faculties of living things, from the upward growth of the plumule of the sprouting seed to the moral sense of man, are primarily for the good of other beings than those which manifest them. Prof. W. K. Brooks.

SCIENTIFIC research may be conveniently divided into two classes one in which the motive is solely the desire to extend the boundaries of knowledge, while in the other the special purpose is to obtain results which have a direct bearing upon problems of manufacture and construction. Explorers on the ship of science go out to discover new lands; and their spirit is not the same as that which actuates the prospectors who follow them with the intention of making the lands profitable

to themselves and others. Both these classes of pioneers have their proper places in the scheme of progress, but they live in different atmospheres. The scientific investigator must have freedom to follow his own course wherever it may lead, whereas technical research can be organised and definite problems presented for which solutions of direct service to man are sought. The standard of value in one case is that of knowledge only, while in the other it is that of profit or use. The scientific mind seeks to understand Nature; the engineering mind to control her for material purposes.

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Some time ago the votes of the readers of an American periodical-Popular Mechanics-were taken as to what inventions were considered to be the seven wonders of the modern world." From a list of numerous inventions, seven had to be selected; and those which received the highest number of votes were: wireless telegraphy, the telephone, the aeroplane, radium, antiseptics and antitoxins, spectrum analysis, and X-rays. Each one of these things had its foundations in purely scientific work and was not the result of deliberate intention to make something of service to humanity.

Wireless telegraphy has its origin in the work of Clerk Maxwell and Hertz; the telephone depends upon the principles of magneto-electric induction discovered by Faraday; Langley's investigations of the resistance of the air to moving bodies led him to construct the first working model of an aeroplane; radium was isolated by the Curies solely on account of its scientific interest and without any view of its practical value; Chloroform was discovered by Liebig and Soubeiran; nitrous oxide or laughing gas" by Davy, and sulphuric ether by Valerius Cordus; the principle of antitoxin treatment was established by Pasteur, Roux and Yersin, and the

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application of it to diphtheria by Behring and Kitasato ; spectrum analysis began with Newton's observations of the decomposition of light by a glass prism, and became a means of discovering the constitutions of the sun and stars by the work of Fraunhofer, Wollaston, Kirchhoff, Lockyer and Huggins; and X-rays were discovered by Röntgen as a natural consequence of previous investigations of Crookes, Hertz and Lenard.

We are aware, of course, that Marconi made wireless telegraphy a commercial undertaking, that Graham Bell, Edison and others perfected the telephone, and the Wright Brothers constructed the first man-carrying flying machine; but these developments represent applications or extensions of new knowledge and not the creation of it. A scientific investigator working in a laboratory was in every case the originator of the fact or principle utilised in the production of what a consensus of opinion considers to be the seven greatest achievements of modern times.

The history of science shows that the greatest advances have always been made by men who undertook their inquiries into Nature without thought of proximate or ultimate practical application or pecuniary reward. The best kind of scientific research cannot be carried on in an atmosphere of commercialism, or where personal profit is the end in view. Few people outside purely scientific circles have any clear idea as to the meaning and object of research.

The object may be purely visionary, as was the object of the early chemists and alchemists, whose operations, extending through the dark centuries of the Middle Ages, left behind practically nothing but an extensive, though barren, literature, the witness of the credulity and ignorance of those times. The lesson to be derived from the whole of this strange history is

one which needs to be continually revived and set in the new light of modern discovery and invention. The lesson is simply that until men began to observe and interrogate Nature for the sake of learning her ways, and without concentrating their attention on the expectation of useful applications of such knowledge, little or no progress was made. In other words, until a sufficient foundation of pure science has been successfully laid there can be no applied science. Real progress comes from the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Sir William Tilden.

Whether the world recognises it or no, all its material advance has been achieved by men of science. In the arts of sculpture and architecture, in literature, in philosophy, the position gained by Greece two thousand years ago remains the standard of excellence for the moderns, whereas the last fifty years or so have seen more additions to natural knowledge than all the ages before them; and the result has been not only advance in material welfare and comfort but also in intellectual outlook. The present era will not be remembered in future history for its art, its literature, or its drama, but for its science, by which it is placed in a pre-eminent position. The names of the men who have made this the golden age of scientific discovery do not loom so large to-day in the public eye as those of successful military commanders or popular orators and authors, but future generations will cherish them when the warrior, the politician and the scribe have passed into the limbo of forgotten things.

Many of the intellectual giants to which the human race will do homage came from the most unexpected places, and the great discoveries they made-often in poverty or in the face of other obstacles-went unregarded by a world which believes that the business of science is to find out useful things. Poisson, one of a brilliant array of mathematicians, whom France