- 'TILE "BRITISH ASSOCIATION
,v, 033r. P4OFESSOR JULIAN HUXLEY.
-reports of outstanding discoveries were made at No the British Association meeting this year, but their absence vas counterbalanced by the high standard of interest of many of the communications and by the un- usually large -number of general discussions and sum.: maries of recent advances. Another feature of this year's meeting is the-stress laid upon the application of science, not merely to commerce and industry, but to our national and imperial life. This aspect was fittingly symbolized in the Prince of Wales' acceptance of the Presidency of the Association, and crystallized in his inaugural address. What- is more, not only is thought thus tending towards the social and national application of science, but greater stress is being laid upon the value of scientific method per .se as well as upon particular products of applied science. :In other words, it is at last being realized that there • is- a -real method of science which is of practical value in administrative, social, and • political problems, as well as in the realms of -physics or chemistry or biology; This method consists in the amassing and publication of evidenoe, and in the constant verification of opinions by reference to the touchstone of the facts. There will always remain innumerable problems on which decisions must be taken on the balance of competing or incom- plete evidence ; and in these realms our statesmen and administrators will always need all the intuitive faculties with which they are- endowed. The task of science is to relieve the man of intuitive and executive ability of much of his burden by reducing the field in which the intuitive decision is necessary, and making it possible to use the resources of trained, skill and scientific certainty. This, of course, has been from the earliest times one of the main practical functions of science. The compass, chrono- meter and nautical almanac are -far less fallible than any intuitive "-sense of direction." No possible extension of the personal and incommunicable dexterity of Wilhelm Tell, for instance, would have permitted the successful aiming of a big gun at a target a dozen miles away.
Sir Thomas Holland, in his presidential address to the Education Section, spoke of the value of the history of science as an instrument for bringing vividly before the mind of the average boy or girl the part which scientific thought and scientific method had played in the history of ideas and the development of modern civilizations : Professor Graham-Kerr's presidential address to the section of Zoology was concerned with the r8le which biology could and should play in general education ; and Dr. Charles Singer and Professor Desch have stressed similar points of view.
The truth is that the educated public is becoming alive to the fact that science has revolutionized the basis of our thought and altered our whole outloOk upon the world, and that we must alter our practice of education accord- ingly. Broadly speaking, there exist two 'main com- peting Weltaussehauungen in current thought—that which, however modified, is a survival of the religious- philosophical outlook of the later Middle Ages, and another .morejpealist, ,sysKem of which different , partial manifestations have been the humanism of the Renais- sance, the rationalism of the eighteenth century, and the modern scientific outlook. However, it is only in -very recent years that this system could become even approxi- mately complete. Before Darwin it could not take in the realm of living. things ; before the rise of psychology it could not link up with the study of mind ; before the rise of anthropology and sociology, human behaviour and human institutions were beyond its grasp. The Renais- sance humanism was incomplete because it took little account of Science ; the eighteenth-century rationalism had not yet Understood the limitations of reason ; and the scientific philosophy of the late nineteenth century was seeking to compress all phenomena into the categories prescribed by physics and chemistry.
The remedy is what we may call scientific humanism—t to base our practice on the facts of science, to advance our knowledge by the methods of science, but-to adOPt a humanistic scale of values, in which both the limitations and the highest potentialities of the human spirit are taken into account.
But I must have done with these general impressions in order to mention a few of the points of special interest which I have been able to come across in these crowded days. Professor H. F. Osborn, the veteran palaeontologist of New York, talked interestingly of evolutionary science to-day and in Darwin's time. He pointed out how quite enormously our knowledge had increasedt and em- phasized the fact thatworkers along all lines of approach, fossil-hunters, systematists, and Mendelians, were arrivino at the firm conclusion that evolution was a gradual process and that it usually continued for long periods in particular directions.
Physics, as Sir William Bragg confessed, still finds itself unable to effect a reconciliation between the quantum theory and the classical theories of radiation : some time in the near future we must expect. -a great new synthesis in this most fundamental of the sciences.
Plant and animal inheritance was much to the fore. Dr. Hislop Harrison exhibited his remarkable specimens of true-breeding dark types of moths, produced as " induced mutations " by. treatment with the salts of heavy metals in their food. It is along these lines that the old-fashioned Lamarckism will develop, to become reconciled with modern genetics. The botanists in their discussion of . the comparatively .recent discovery of sex-chromosomes in plants, revealed that the , sex- determining machinery of plants with separate sexes is in all essentials the same as that of higher animals and of man.
Sir Jagadis Bose gave an animated lecture to a crowded audience on his experiment on the conduction of impulses in sensitive plants, on the sap-pumping mechanism of plants, and on the effects of poisons and stimulants on their activities. His instruments -of precision and,bis experimental facts are remarkable ; but it is rather ..a pity that he generalizes so , freely. 'It does not yet seem clear that the mechanism which conducts stimuli in mimosa is really similar in essentials to the animal nervous system ; and it is quite certain that, even if everyone of Sir Jagadis's experiments concerning sap- ascent is confirmed, the pumping mechanism is some- thing very different from any known animal heart. Yet he has proclaimed the identity of nervous and circu- latory mechanisms in the two kingdoms.
Especially interesting were the addresses and dis- cussions concerned with the impact of European civiliza- tions and methods upon primitive peoples. Mr. Ormsby- Gore's, presidential- Address.to the section of Geography was a - most illuminating survey of the problems presented in Africa. How many stay-at-home folk knew that writing, save for a slight infiltration from the Mohammedan areas to the north, was unknown. to the Central African ?
The. Oxford meeting marks an . important epoch in the history of the British Association, by its clear trend away from the detailed and over-specialist character of most recent meetings, and by linking Science more 'firmly with national development in all its #speots.
Previous page
