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He may be able to put on half a sheet of notepaper that which will keep in prosperity a whole class in the community for a generation. But, being a chemist and not a business man, at the end of that time he will be lucky if he is still outside the poorhouse, and still more lucky if he can still call any shred of his discoveries his own. He is no individualist. He knows that every step on the long road leading up to his discoveries, except the last little step he made himself, was laboriously taken by his predecessors and colleagues and presented to him as a free gift in the past.

This sort of chemist, the real discovering person, is a very rare bird, but a few of them would go a very long way. It is almost needless to say that this is not the sort of chemist that is specially catered for by university curricula. In fact, from the business point of view he is a thoroughly bad investment. He pays no more fees than his far more numerous class-mates, his training is preposterously expensive, if he is to know his subject and not merely to know about it, and, worse still, when he is hatched, no one, scarcely even his own professor, can really be quite sure whether he is a swan or a goose.

Obviously, with universities whose finances are managed by business men, the good staple lines of chemical students are far more attractive. You can turn them out in large numbers relatively cheaply; there is always a steady demand, their fees aggregate to a considerable sum and bear an appreciable proportion to the costs of their education. The firstyear medical students are the most numerous and uniform in their requirements in the Scottish universities. Then there are those who are going to be teachers, and take chemistry for a year as one of the science subjects they are allowed, in strict moderation, to take for an Arts degree. Lastly, there are the

science students, who take chemistry as one of the three subjects required for the B.Sc. And of this last, relatively very small class, one-third, perhaps, intend to take up the study of chemistry seriously, and at the end of their training have made any real beginning at all towards the qualification of a trained chemist.

Speaking, not even purely as a chemist, and gauging the relative value to the nation of all this teaching, it is to my mind in the inverse ratio to that in which it would be regarded if numbers, or revenue earned to the university, were the criteria. You need the small army of professionally-trained students to keep the machine going. But a machine that just keeps itself going is not a prime mover. A university that does not provide training, the best it can afford, at whatever seemingly unremunerative expenditure, for those who are to be pioneers, who are to stand erect for the first time and know their way, where all before have been befogged, in whose solitary footsteps the small army can follow, such a university is to my mind oblivious to the more important and more. repaying side of its dual function.

SCIENCE AND THE STATE

I WISH to discuss with you to-night some of the relations between Science and the State. I want to show how, in the particular question we are considering, one is brought up instantly against the democratic idea as it is applied, falsely, as I think, to education, the idea of equal educational opportunities to all, not in the narrow sense to which later I wish to subscribe ȧ hearty enough adherence, but in the practical sense in which it finds application in the schools and universities of this country. I have to make what I know must appeal to many of you as a very bold, not to say provocative, statement at the outset, and it is simply this. Educate your millions, and bring to every boy and girl in this country the benefits of as sound and thorough an education as you can afford. The fact remains that, for sheer practical value to the community, and hard cash in the pockets of each member of it, there are a few, say one in every million, who are worth as much to the community as the rest of the million put together, and whom, if you miss or merge with the rest, the education of the million will avail you little indeed. I know, in these democratic days, it sounds like a restatement of the doctrine of a privileged class, living at the expense of the community. But be assured the statement is democratic enough in this,

1 Address to the Independent Labour Party, Aberdeen, ist October 1916.

at least, that the few geniuses I have in mind are drawn from no exclusive hierarchy or caste, but appear in the cradles of the world as capriciously as the wind which bloweth where it listeth, and according to laws, if such there be, that hitherto have defied the search of the new-born science of eugenics.

My statement is novel only in one respect. The geniuses I have in mind are the creative geniuses of science, rather than those of literature or art. In this field, the statement is as commonplace as regards Shakespeare or a Michael Angelo. Its novelty, if it is novel, is that it applies to the practical values of the everyday world, the measure of which is money, as much as to æsthetical and ethical values, which cannot be measured in the current coin. I know I shall be told, though probably not by you, that these latter things are of more value than money, that a man may gain the whole world and lose his own soul, and so on. You, at least, will not be over-impressed by this talk about the dangers of materialism, which comes appropriately enough from those that neither toil nor spin. You will have sufficient acquaintance with the realities of the world in which you live to know that, for every soul slain by over-indulgence and luxury, thousands perish besotted by the lack of the bare necessities of a decent existence, and that the animalising influence of want, and a hopeless, unremitting battle for the primal needs of the body, must be faithfully dealt with before you can even begin to think of the higher spiritual and social aspirations of humanity, rather than of the few. Before the advent of science such universal aspirations were not capable of being satisfied.

So if I choose this ground-the ground of practical everyday life rather than that of the visionary and dreamer-it is not because it is the only aspect of

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science, but because it is the one of most general practical importance.

The elevating influences of the study of Nature, the sublime emotions awakened by the spectacle of the mists being slowly dissipated from the veiled countenance of Truth, are at least as potent as any encountered by man in his persistent and unwearing dissection of his own self. But, distinct from this, science is unique in pointing the way to the realisation of that necessary practical antecedent of all that makes life universally holy rather than animal. Neglect it, and the finer voices may call, but the ears that should hear will be dull.

There may be a tendency on the part of some of my audience to regard science as something particularly associated with the waging of war and to look upon scientific men as a class as under the suspicion of being in the pay of the great armament firms of the world, and as finding, in the universal race for armaments, the most profitable and natural outlet for their inventive and productive genius. Whether or not I am mistaken in that impression, at least it can hardly be gainsaid that this point of view is foremost in the minds of those most influential and vocal of the leaders of public opinion, to whom, for the most part, the war has discovered the importance and indispensability of science for the first time.

I wish to-night, if I can, to do something first to combat this false impression. It is true, of course, at the moment that scientific researches and inquiries are now very largely suspended, and that the energies of scientific men in this country have almost wholly been drawn into the vortex, in common with the rest of the energies of the nation. Scientific men here now, as much or more than any other class, are concerned with science no longer, but only with its