Abstract
THE anniversary dinner of the Royal Society was held as we went to press last week. Lord Robson proposed the toast of “The Royal Society,” and it was replied to by Sir Archibald Geikie, K.C.B., president of the society. In the course of his remarks, Lord Robson pointed out that in nearly every direction the labour and research of science, however remote they may sometimes seem from the affairs of the workshop or the office, are opening up new and almost illimitable sources of wealth and new avenues of profitable employment. It is the man of science who is to decide the fate of the tropics; not the soldier, or the statesman with his programmes and perorations, but the quiet entomologist. He is the man of science who of all others strikes popular imagination the least, and gets less of popular prestige; but he has begun a fascinating campaign for the sanitary conquest of those enormous tracts of the earth, and before long he will have added their intensely fertile soil, almost as a free gift, to the productive resources of the human race. The report in the Times states that Lord Robson continued as follows:—“Not long ago it was my duty to consider legislation in reference to the most complicated problems of overcrowding in cities. That is essentially a problem for statesmen, but not for statesmen alone. Perhaps the most hopeful attack on overcrowding is being unconsciously made by those men of science who have lately done so much to improve the transmission of electric power. They are on the way to make it possible and profitable for factories to establish themselves away from cities and coalpits, and yet have the exact amount of power they want each day for their machinery sent down to them every morning by wire at a trivial cost. Some day manufacturers will begin to go back to the land, and we shall regard engine-building or soap-boiling as rural occupations. We look to you, the men of science, and almost to you alone, to ensure, not only that our centres of population shall not be congested, but also that our cities, now smoke-laden and devitalised, shall not be polluted. I have spoken of a sanitary conquest of the tropics. Give us also a sanitary conquest of the air of England. What a programme of social reform the Royal Society has got! Yet I have not heard that you are making any claims on the Development Fund. In all seriousness and earnestness, I contend that you ought to be the most favoured, as you would certainly be the most meritorious, of all claimants on that reservoir of national generosity. The various sections and interests who are on the way to absorb it all are seeking, I believe, without exception, to advance the material interests of those whom they represent. The oclaims which you put forward on behalf of experimental research would be wholly unselfish. They would be for work in the common interest, in the interest of mankind. In the report for the year there is a very long list of work odone in different departments of scientific research with small sums like 10l. or so given out of your small Government grant to meet expenses. It is a list capable of indefinite expansion, and indicates work that might be done on a larger and more fruitful scale. Undertakings like the Research Commission, to Uganda may well return their cost a hundred-fold, and I venture to suggest that an appeal should be made to those in charge of the Development Fund to give a wider scope to your disinterested and most beneficent activities.”
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The Claims of Scientific Research . Nature 85, 183–184 (1910). https://doi.org/10.1038/085183a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/085183a0