search is not treated as anyone's business in life, but as a thing to be pursued as a hobby in odd moments. between the various and manifold duties of a professor and his staff, and in vacations.

But teaching research-that is again a serious business. It would be a thousand pities if some potential genius, for lack of research scholarships and fellowships, was lost to this country. Everyone must have at least a chance of proving their capacity for research. Most excellent. But what I want to know is why trouble if, as soon as that capacity is proved, the possessor is to be put in a position where it will never again be possible for him to devote himself to research as a business, but merely as a recreation in the interval of teaching! Before the war, at least, these research scholarships and fellowships were a veritable cul-de-sac to the many, through the general apathy and neglect of science by which this country is distinguished. There literally were not teaching posts, let alone research posts, open for more than a very few of the successful. Too many found themselves stranded without any opening whatever, whereas if they had eschewed research and devoted themselves to any ordinary profession, a very much lower scale of capacity would have ensured them an ample and expanding livelihood.

Extravagant comparisons have been appearing in the press lately between the Scottish and the English educational systems, in favour of the former. But if this is justifiable at all, it can only be with regard to one side of the question-the education of the general masses of the population, and that, admittedly, refers to a past generation rather than to-day. In regard to this equally important question of scientific research and investigation, Scotland is as far behind England as England is behind the rest of

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the world. In the newer universities of England, in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, London, and so on, there is at least an honest attempt being made to make them real homes of research. In Scotland, the country to which Mr Carnegie, in 1901, gave a million pounds for this very object, the money has been largely diverted from that purpose, and routine teaching is yearly absorbing a larger part of it.

To sum up, scientific research is capable of raising the general standard of life, without limit, by the solution it affords of the material and physical problems that prevent progress. But for it to do so, it must no longer be treated as a hobby or parttime occupation of the leisure hours of busy teachers, engaged in catering for the needs of the multitude in education, but as a serious business distinct altogether from teaching, perhaps the most serious and momentous of all the manifold activities of the State. For from it flows the knowledge of Nature, upon which every advance that governs the material prosperity of the nation depends, which the inventors, technologists, engineers and medical men apply to useful purposes, and which, through them, makes all the difference between unemployment and prosperity, disease and health, retrogression and progress, and lastly, which, in time of war, is as necessary to the defence of the realm as the courage of brave deeds and the endurance of stout hearts. In its highest and most fruitful forms scientific research needs that same overpowering and divine passion for truth, that horror of, and detestation for, even the shadow of a lie, which is the common necessary antecedent of all forms of creative work. But it needs laboratories and special homes for its successful prosecution, freedom from interruption and distraction, and a lifetime's devotion-all of these, always as it progresses, more and more. It is, if only for these reasons, more

easy to stultify and prevent than any other form of creative work. In itself, it may make little or no general appeal to the aspirations and instincts of the community, whose material interests nevertheless are practically governed by it.

The problem of how this is to be achieved, as well as the satisfaction of the educational needs of the multitude, a totally different question, is the problem which, in my opinion, this democracy has not solved, and which it must solve if it is to justify its right to survive.

THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE, AND

WHAT BARS THE WAY1

THE future of science is a fit subject for the consideration of the Aberdeen University Scientific Society in these days when everything is being cast into the crucible of war to be consumed or refined. I have added to the title, "and what bars the way," because I believe that active opposition has still to be overcome before science takes its rightful place in the Scottish universities. Indeed, one has only to contrast the growth and power of science in the outside world, not merely the world of things and facts, but equally the world of ideas, with the position it holds relatively to the so-called classical studies in the ancient universities, with the possible exception of Cambridge, or, again, to contrast these with the new universities that have sprung up in England and Wales, to realise that the older institutions have lost whatever capacity they may once have had for intellectual leadership, and toil painfully behind the times, a clog rather than a stimulus to the coming task of national reconstruction. The period of outspoken, honest opposition and hostility to science of a couple of generations ago on the part of those whose most ancient and cherished beliefs had been rudely overthrown by the growth of our knowledge of external nature, has given place to a far more

1 Presidential Address to the Aberdeen University Scientific Society, 3rd November 1916.

insidious and deadly secret distrust and hostility to science, on the part of those left still with power and influence in the councils of the State. This second phase, meaner in motive than the first, derives its strength from a negative source, far stronger than any downright antagonism, from sheer mental inertia and the comforting belief of the masses that the world is big enough and lazy enough to swallow up science without really departing, by a hair's-breadth, from any of its former habits of thought, or relinquishing any of its old, inefficient, empirical methods. As one of the few clear decisions yet reached by the war, this second and infinitely more dangerous phase of hostility to science has, I believe, received its death-blow. Whether its end be lingering or sudden it is too soon to say.

The curricula of ancient universities accumulate rather than evolve. The new cult of science is sandwiched with a culture that came to maturity thousands of years ago. Nothing is ever abolished from the curriculum. If there were real freedom of choice, the survival of the fittest would operate. But the whole system of bursaries and regulations for degrees is to bolster up and perpetuate a museum of ancient learning, and the system of finance to divert to its support the resources needed for living subjects. What Sir Arthur Evans has characterised as the dull incuria of the parents to intellectual pursuits allows it. The result is that the ancient universities become, not by any means the quiet sanctuaries of ancient learning, which would be relatively harmless, but the active agents in perpetuating in power a type of man who is hopelessly out of tune with his environment, however rational he may have been in the Middle Ages. Then Latin was much what Esperanto is trying to become to-day, a universal written language, and as necessary