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establishments to which the State affords partial support, such as those under the Development Commission and the Research Associations, the corresponding numbers are 150 and 50. In addition, grants are made to 145 research students and to 11 independent research workers, involving a yearly sum of about £50,000.

From the foregoing account of the connection of the Departments of State in the United Kingdom with chemistry, it is possible to trace a gradual development and ultimately a change in attitude, in passing through the stages of compulsion, expediency, and assistance.

From motives of security the State was compelled to give heed to chemical matters involved in its defence, such as those which appertained to munitions of war, including metals used in their manufacture; it was constrained to uphold the standard of its currency; and it was obliged to secure a revenue. As a consequence, the first chemical departments were set up in connection with these activities, and from them have emanated notable additions to chemical knowledge, improvements in methods of manufacture, and specifications for Government requirements that have led to improved material becoming available for civilian use. Although mostly conducted with inadequate staff, the study of these questions, it can be claimed, proved of national advantage when the time of need arose.

In the next stage, the public conscience having been awakened by the pioneering work of Playfair, it appeared expedient to safeguard health by attention to sanitation, and, as the quality of food was unsatisfactory, to set up a chemical control. Although a start was made by Davy, a member of the then Board of Agriculture, progress in this subject passed to private enterprise, and a century elapsed before direct assistance was afforded to this important matter. Out of these activities come our present system of supervision over the purity of air, water, and food, and also the recent progress made in the application of chemistry and physics to problems of the soil.

The last and more recent stage is in the nature of a recognition that the State is under an obligation to assist science, and in this case the science of chemistry, on which so many important industries are based. It took the war to bring home the danger that, although the record of the country as regards discovery in pure science was unrivalled, its systematic application was too often left to other countries, with the result of lamentable shortages during war and the risk of many industries being ineffective in peace. A measure of Government intervention and action appeared requisite, and research became the business of a Government Department. Outside of the great firms which maintain progressive chemical staffs, the firms in numerous industries have been encouraged and assisted to co-operate in the betterment of their manufactures by the application of the methods of science, and from these associations and the organisations dealing with national problems begins to flow a stream of communications indicative. of useful work accomplished. Nor is the foundation of it all neglected, for encouragement is given to workers in the academic field to follow out their ideas, whithersoever they may lead them, in accordance with the truth that research in applied science might lead to reforms, but research pure science leads to revolutions.'

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It is important to be able to record an advance in securing an interchange of information among Government Departments, and between their work and that of the universities, a matter which before the war was unsatisfactory, as it was mainly personal and sporadic.

And it is a hopeful sign also that, although the knowledge and appreciation of the methods and capabilities of science are still generally wanting, there have been of late signs that these matters are coming to engage the attention of those who guide the policy of the State.

SECTION C.-GEOLOGY.

Note to Address on following pages, by the President of the Section.-It was hoped that this Section would have been presided over by Dr, C. W. Andrews. He had indeed accepted the invitation of the Council to become President, but the state of his health later compelled him to resign. His untimely death has deprived our science of a widely-travelled and most talented geologist, and a vertebrate paleontologist of world-wide distinction.

SECTION C.—GEOLOGY.

GEOLOGY IN THE SERVICE OF MAN.

ADDRESS BY

PROFESSOR W. W. WATTS, Sc.D., M.Sc., LL.D., V.P.G.S., F.R.S.,

PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION.

Introduction.

ALTHOUGH Geology in the modern restricted sense of the word is over a century old, and possesses a flourishing family of descendant sciences, it is still possible to trace its immediate parentage and ancestry. The only begetter is unquestionably the mining industry, and it is to the ample exposure of rocks in mines, their condition and arrangement in the simpler mining districts, and the necessity for accurate knowledge of these districts with regard to composition, succession, and arrangement, that we owe the earliest detailed knowledge of the earth-crust in certain restricted localities.

The other parent was of more advanced years, and may be described as insatiate curiosity: the natural instinct for observing and collecting odd and bizarrerarities' found in excavations or seen in natural rock exposures. These fossils, using the word as then employed and not in the restricted sense now usual, naturally kindled interest by reason of their natural beauty, their regularity in shape, their properties, their likeness to, and yet their tantalising difference from, the appearance of living animals and plants. It was tempting to draw inferences from their occurrence and to explain them either by marvellous operations which fuller understanding of Nature had not then inhibited, or by means of catastrophic events like those familiar in the Mosaic cosmogony.

Although much had been observed and thought out by his predecessors, it is to Werner that we owe the most successful generalisations in a mineralbearing district; generalisations which gained a wide influence owing to the enthusiasm and eloquence that attracted students from all over the world and imbued them with the desire to confirm and spread the Master's ideas. To Werner also is due a reaction from the fanciful speculations of preceding periods, with which he was so impatient that he proposed to drop the very term Geology and to substitute his own word Geognosy' for it, a word intended by him to separate the knowable from the unknown.

Probably there would have been less controversy between Neptunists and Plutonists had Werner committed more of his work to writing, and not left us dependent on his pupils for their versions of his views. But it is a curious fact, and one probably not dissociated from a geologist's devotion to field study, that many of those who have made great advances have either disliked the act of writing or have been unfortunate in the style of their written work. It will be sufficient to couple with Werner in this respect such names as William Smith, Sedgwick, and even Hutton, not to mention those of more recent geologists. It has not been from Smith alone that views and conclusions have had to be extracted, almost by force, and committed to writing by faithful devotees.

Yet, after all, this failing has not been without its advantages. The joy of such men is in discovery, and they are happy and contented when, but only when, they feel perfect confidence in their conclusions. If their results then get published it is with an authority and finality denied to lesser men. In the progress of their work they are apt, as in fact all of them did, to infect their friends and students with the enthusiasm that only the spoken word can arouse. And to others they have always been most generous, even lavish, in giving ideas and momentum, partly out of sheer good-nature, but much more through the desire to watch the germination of the good seed that they sow broadcast and to see the harvest reaped, not by or for themselves, but for the advantage of the science whose welfare is their chief care.

During the early growth of the science, as in human families, it was the influence of the other parent that was most felt. From the earliest thinkers of Greece and Rome we have record of numberless observations and discoveries, sometimes in respect of minerals or organic fossils, sometimes of unusual phenomena in mountains or volcanoes or in the relations of sea and land, generally leading to reasoned conclusions, many of them perhaps fanciful, some even absurd, but others so sound and far-seeing that they have not been upset at the present day. Many other countries, joining the favoured ones along the Mediterranean, carried the torch forward, and, in spite of the clogging influence of the vested intellectual interests of the day, the stock of knowledge gradually grew, until we find that Leonardo da Vinci was able to make as great an advance in the knowledge of the earth as he did in his own arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture.

It is true that during this period observers had a tendency to confine themselves too exclusively to one or other side of their subject, and were in the habit of reproaching one another with neglect of neighbouring branches, but even this made for progress by stimulating competition and discussion.

In spite, however, of all that had gone before, in the fields both of factcollecting and of speculation, it will be admitted that no single man made so great an individual advance, or placed it upon such an enduring foundation, or did so much on which the future of his science was to depend, as William Smith. And it is noteworthy that the spur to his discoveries was not so much his theoretical views or even his scientific zeal, as a plain and practical issue the finding of a short-cut to speedy and accurate land valuation.

The discovery by the Father of English Geology' that fossils are the ⚫ medals of creation' and that strata are each characterised by special suites of organisms was certainly one of the greatest ever made in the history of geology, and upon it have been founded directly or indirectly almost all the later advances in the science. But for the fuller utilisation of his discoveries there were needed the artistic faculty and a wide knowledge of places and people, both of which he fortunately possessed. Thus he was able to introduce handy, crisp, easily remembered and pleasantly sounding local terms to characterise his ' Formations,' and to represent the outcrop of strata on maps which were not merely topographical but, for the first time, were tectonic also. So well did he discharge this latter function that a comparison of his general map of England with the latest production

of the Geological Survey on a scale at all comparable with it fills one with astonishment at the amount of work accomplished by him, single-handed, and with admiration for his accuracy.

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It is strange that, in the amateur and official work which followed during much of the nineteenth century, so little interest was taken in the industrial application of geological knowledge which in Smith's hands had been so productive. The science had, as has been said, the landed manner,' and the dignity of its application to arts and industries was little appreciated. A former Director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, Sir Andrew Ramsay, quoted with approval the saying of one of his colleagues, it is but the overflowings of science that enter into and animate industry.' And thus, though the scientific side of geology stood to gain much otherwise unattainable information from contact with its economic application, this source of knowledge was not fully utilised, and an air of mutual suspicion-not wholly unjustified-grew up between theoretical' geologists and those who applied geology to mining and other economic problems. Fortunately this feeling is passing away; the two sides have found that each is indispensable to the other, and geologists are everywhere co-operating with those whose work is connected with the discovery or exploitation of the mineral wealth of the earth-crust.

Material Service.

Coal. The first branch of industry to which geology made itself indispensable was coal-mining. Geology has long been in close contact with its problems, in mapping the extent of coal-fields, collecting information as to the succession of measures and the existence and lie among them of wants, faults, and igneous rocks, tracing the extension and variation of coal-seams, and estimating the resources available; and, as seams are worked at increasing depths, and in those parts of fields concealed under thick unconformable cover of more recent formations, the work of the geologist has become more essential and increasingly productive.

It is interesting to observe the application of the academic' sides of geology to these more recondite problems, in unravelling tectonic complexes, in the collection of facts which may eventually elucidate the precise conditions under which different varieties of coal have originated, in applying knowledge as to the limits of the original areas of coal deposit, in the interpretation of stratification in the light of the progressive travel of coal-forming conditions geographically across the coal-producing areas, and in the stratigraphical relationship and exact mode of formation of the covering rock-systems.

It is true that the accessibility of coals when first exploited, and their distribution in seams of varying quality, led, and in the newer areas are still leading, to much waste waste on fruitless search in the light of obtainable knowledge, in exploitation of good, thick, and easily worked seams to the neglect of poorer ones, in the non-preservation of satisfactory plans and the consequent leaving of derelict areas, in unsatisfactory drainage, and in the loss of valuable by-products. But there is a corresponding advantage to those of our generation that some exposed areas of complicated structure and many of the concealed coal-fields were left for ourselves and future generations by reason of working difficulties which it would have been premature to face in the time of easily obtained abundance.

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