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every child of the standard of intelligence admitting to the university so thorough and sufficient a general education that, at the university, the serious life-work could be entered upon at once. A modernised school curriculum, finally and completely liberated from the deadening influence of the Middle Ages, would bring a child up to the university with something of that enthusiasm and passion for knowledge for its own sake which, of yore, was the pride of Scotland's poor scholars. "Cultural" subjects would remain, throughout life, the natural recreation from professional or highly specialised studies. The chief charge against the old curricula is that they destroy in youth the enthusiasm and aspiration for learning, without which educational systems are but useless machinery without motive power.

In experimental science in Scotland the greatest need for reform exists. The association of the Honours M.A. with the B.Sc. so favours certain subjects, especially mathematics and applied mathematics, by giving two degrees for little more than the work of either, that it has been a powerful factor in the neglect of experimental science. It is nearly incredible, but, until very recently here, and possibly elsewhere still, those who took this combination and were for the most part going to be science schoolmasters, were turned out to teach chemistry in schools without, of necessity, ever having worked in a chemical laboratory. What sort of chemistry, I wonder, is it that they hand on to their pupils. The science of the mathematical arts man with M.A. (Hon.), B.Sc., is too often such as is calculated to bring science into disrepute.

But it is on the financial side that this university is most open to criticism in its treatment of science. An investigation of the published accounts for 191314, the year prior to the war, explained much that

SCIENTIFIC BENEFACTIONS DIVERTED

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hitherto had been a mystery to me and left me frankly astounded. I have formed the deliberate opinion that it is useless for benefactors, like Mr Carnegie, to give money for science and scientific research, because under the existing system it will be diverted. Chemistry here would have been actually better off under the system that was in vogue before 1889. The wealth that has poured into the coffers of the university, either from the Carnegie benefaction or from State grants, passes it by. It supports itself practically by hard teaching, and the money it is stated in the published accounts to get, and which, if it did get, would enable something to be done on the research side, are mere book-keeping transactions. Either this must be rectified or, before science can take its proper place in Scotland, new universities for science and modern subjects must be founded.

But apart from the petty tricks and sophistries by which those who claim to guard the eternal verities against the encroach of modern heresies have secured to themselves the benefit of moniesintended for scientific study and research, the general attitude of this country toward science, whether from dullness, ignorance or antipathy, is unworthy of it. Of all the great nations of the earth none have benefited more by scientific discovery, and none have repaid the debt in more beggarly fashion. To boast of what this country has done in science as compared with other nations would be to follow the bad example of Germany. To boast of what this country has done for science as compared with other great powers would be impossible. But it is legitimate patriotism to be very proud and satisfied that, in spite of the lack of adequate encouragement and support, this country can claim no mean or subordinate share See Appendix.

in scientific developments even up to the present day.

I have laid these matters before the Scientific Association, not in any spirit of destructive criticism, but because they affect fundamentally and vitally your careers. It is upon you, rather than upon me or upon science, that the penalty falls.

THE EVOLUTION OF MATTER1

THE ultimate constitution of matter is a subject which has always exercised a powerful attraction upon the minds of men. Philosophical speculations of the essential unity of all matter and of the possibility of transforming the different kinds into one another have come down to us from the ancients. The modern science of Chemistry had its origin in the actual attempts at such transformation or transmutation made by the alchemists in the Middle Ages. These attempts centred around the transmutation of lead or other base metal into gold, and the alchemists believed that there existed, and spent their lives trying to discover, a "philosopher's stone" to which was ascribed the power to effect this transmutation in almost unlimited amount. The philosopher's stone was also credited with acting as a universal medicine, prolonging life and health indefinitely, or at least to periods rivalling those enjoyed by the Hebrew patriarchs of old. Whether these ideas were wholly the inventions of charlatans, or whether they were the distorted parrot-like repetition of the wisdom of a lost Atlantis, none can now say. But it may be remarked that sober modern science of to-day sees in the power to effect transmutation of the elements the power to prolong the physical welfare of the community for indefinite periods. Indeed, without some such discovery the phase of civilisation, ushered in by 1 Contributed to the Aberdeen University Review, February 1917.

science, must from its very nature be but transitory. We are spending improvidently in a year the physical means of life that would have sufficed our ancestors for a century, and the exhaustion of the available supplies of energy, upon which the present era of the world relies, is already no longer a remotely distant prospect.

So long as the world was supposed to be six days older than man, and man a creature of the last 6000 years, the idea that we were "the first that ever burst" into the silent sea of science was pardonable enough. Possibly we were not. Just as no one would feel qualified to write a history of this country from materials gleaned from the newspapers of the present century, so no one ought to be so bold as to attempt to write a history of the human race from such written records as now exist, the most ancient of which go back to a time when the race was quite inappreciably younger than it is to-day. Neither is there any very valid ground for the belief that the startling advance civilisation had made in the past hundred or so years is in any way the climax or natural culmination of the slow and by no means even continuous progress previously. It seems rather a sudden forward leap apparently unconnected with and certainly not culminating necessarily out of the periodic ebb and flow of human fortune of which history tells. It is the work of a mere handful of men. The mass probably are little more scientific to-day than they were two thousand years ago, and this being the case, the advance does not appear to be the inauguration of the millennium, nor, indeed, of any other prolonged period of stable régime. Nothing but the most sublime egoism, the unconscious constitutional disability of the natural man to conceive of a universe not revolving around himself, can make

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