OBITER DICTA.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18906, 22 January 1927, Page 14

OBITER DICTA.

(By K.) The situation in China is gravely dangerous, and everyone ought to be helping, even'if the help amounts to nothing more than understanding who is who and why is why. But I cannot help, and canuot understand. After taking a good long look at the situation, I decided that it would be more profitable to think of Science or of the League of Nations. China is a member of the League of Nations, but the difficulty is that the League of Nations does not know which is China (all the laundry tickets looking exactly alike), and so the League of Nations is not worth thinking about. There remains Science, which is as optimistic as ever. An eminent bio-chemist has been telling the Society of Chemical Industry that chemistry can and does join in the good work of discovering " the origin of life." The scientists, he said, have explored inorganic matter to the ultimate atom, but the gap between the inorganic and the organic has not been bridged. But, he added, " I believe that as this apparently impassable gap is approached, the nearer we come to it the nearer we shall realise that it is an insignificant depression in the contour of the land, and that one simple experiment in bridging will enable us to pass from one side to the other. If you ask me to present you with any evidence to support my view I can, I fear, give you little or none that will carry any weight." Nevertheless, he offers you the privilege of thinking, with him, that the first life-forms "were little more than inorganic colloidal complexes at the surface of which energy exchanges took place with the formation of organic compounds."

What Science will do when' it discovers the origin of life one cannot know. Only one thing is certain: there I will be furious quarrels concerning the use to which the new invention will be put, and nobody will have sense or. strength enough to say that Life is a mistake, and that Science has done harm enough already and very little! real good. The soundest view of Science as that which was quoted here four or five years ago: Those who take up the paradoxical attitude that Science has come'.air a blessing to the masses never explain why it has been iound from beginning so utterly contemptuous of the real needs of the ordinary man. Why, lie asks, for example, doeß it concern itself with sprums to tackle obsciiie diseases which it is forced first to invent, yet never deign to find a remedy for his abominably frequent colds? Why should it amaze him daily by transferring eyes or other organs from one reptile to another, but never get down to stop the intolerable, nuisance of hair sprouting nightly from the chin!

The lover of Science will reply that at least the entomologists are doing good- work, arid will point to the parasites which have beeijt brought in to destroy the earwigs, which were brought /in to destroy the rabbits, which were brought in Jo keep down the sparrows, which were imported as enemies of the insects introduced as parasites of the earliest pest, which in its turn the Maoris probably, brought from Hawaiki at the. instigation of some early tohunga. This is what scientists, if it occurred in any other*domain of life, wo,uld call the vicious circle, although it sounds, of cdurse, like an entomological parable of Democracy engaged in making progress. For our democratic leaders, listening to the loudest voice of the moment, pass an Act for the Expelling of Natur? with

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