THE PROBLEMS OF SCIENCE.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 November 1920, Page 11 (Supplement)

THE PROBLEMS OF SCIENCE.

DISCUSSED BY THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. '' " i WHAT SCIENTISTS ARE SAYING. London, Sept. 13. "The discussions of the British Association were inspired by a new zeal in tlio hunt for the master secrets of the world. At the same time tha speeches were more practical as well as more imaginative; indeed, in many ways more nearly in touch with national affairs, with intensive agriculture, with intensive fisheries, with tlie physical perfection of the race, with electrical invention, with science in commerce." —Daily Mail. Here are some of the more important facts and opinions from the papers read before the British Association at Cardiff last week. , .. ;ii _ DEPTH OF THE OCEAN. Dr. W. A. Herdman, President of the British Association, said: "Some few things we know approximately—nothing completely. We know that the greatest depths of the ocean, about six miles, are a little greater than the highest mountains on land, and Sir John Murray has calculated that if all the land were washed down into the sea the whole globe would be covered by an ocean averaging about two miles in depth." THE MYSTERIOUS EEL.

"Take the case of our common freshwater eel as an example of how little we knotv, and at the same lime of how much has been discovered," said Dr. Herdman. "All the eels of our streams and lakes of N.W. Europe live and feed and grow under our eyes without reproducing their kind —no spawning eel has ever been seen. "After living for years in immaturity, at last near the end of their lives the large male and female yellow eels undergo a change in appearance and in nature. They acquire a silvery colour and flieir eyes enlarge, and in this bridal attire they commence the long journey which ends in maturity, reproduction and death. "" "From all the fresh waters they migrate in tlie autumn to the coast, from the inshore seas to the open ocean and still westward and south to the mid-Atlantic and we know not how much farther—for, the exact locality and manner of spawning have still to be discovered." Professor Stanley Gardener said, "The wonder of river cols living in our shallowest pools and travelling two or three thousand miles to breed, very likely on the bottom in' 2,000 fathoms, and subjected to pressures varying from 141bs. to two tons per square inch, was peculiarly attractive." MAN'S LIFE ON EARTH.

Professor \Y. M. Flinders Pctrie, F. R.S., the famous Egyptologist, said that "all organic life must cease on the surface of the earth within 200,000 years from now. but that low forms might struggle on in the sea for a few million year.-. He based his estimate on the quantity of carbonic, acid in tlie atmosphere and the rate at which it was being 'fixed' by alkalies. Terrestrial life would gradually cease and come to an end long before tlie final disappearance of the gas. On this calculation, man can expect to survive for a much shorter period than that of his known historical past."

SCIENCE OF MAN. "I will not," said Professor Vine Pearson, "go so far as to say that, if the science of man had been developed to the extent oi physical science in all European countries, and had then had its due authority recognised, there would have been no war, but I will venture to say that the war would have been of a different character, and we should not have felt that the fate of European society and of European culture hung in the balance, as at this moment they certainly do. "The man of to-day is precisely what heredity and his genealogy, his past history and his pre-hlstory, have made him. "If the spirit of violence be innate in man, if there be times when he not only sees red, but rejoices in it—and that was the strong impression I formed when I crossed Germany on August 1, 1914—then outbreaks of violence will not cease till troglodyte mentality is bred out of man. That is why the question of trolodyte or liylobatio ancestry is not a pursuit of dead bones. It is a vital problem on which turns much of folk-psychology. It is a problem utile to the State. ENERGY IN THE STARS. Professor A. S. Eddington, President of the Physical Science Section, asked: "What was the source of the heat which the sun and stars were continually squandering? The usual answer was that it was obtained from the gravitational energy converted as the star readily contracted. But this answer neglected the practical consequences.

"A star must he drawing on some vast reservoir of energy by means unknown to us. This reservoir could scarcely be other than the subatomic energy, which, it was known, existed in all matter, and of which it was sometimes dreamt that we could learn how to release it and use it for our service. The store was well-nigh inexhaustible, if oi-ly it could be tapped. There was sufiicient in the sun to maintain its output of heat for 15 billion years.

"Sir Ernest Rutherford had recently been breaking down the atoms of oxygen and nitrogen, driving out an isotope of helium from them. What was possible in the Cavendish laboratory might not be difficult in the sun." STONES THAT SPEAK. Dr. Bather, President or the- Geological Section, said: "Students of fossils mialit h.i'.c been expected to support the view-, that evolution had come about by suilden changes, especially as the gaps in the scries of fossils were great. But. on the other hand, they were unanimous as to the evidence from the rocks being in favour of slow, continuous change. Wherever a series was complete, and had been studied carefully, it showed a slow and continuous evolution. "The general result of the discussion was to show that Mendelian work, instead of being opposed to the Darwinian principles of evolution, was likely to reinforce them, and that paleontology, zoology, and botany bore witness to the greatness of the Darwinian conceptions,"

WASTEFUL SOWING. Sir Daniel Hall (London) said that "it was usual in England to sow 2i bushels of seed wheat to the acre, but properly- managed, half a bushel or less would cover the field with the necessary plants for a maximum crop. Experiments were being made to get a machine that would sow economically, and, even if we ?ould save a busnel an acre of su.-d, the -.-wintry would gain .1 per cent, of its output of wlieat, worth well over a million jjjunds a. year." SYMPATHETIC WORKERS. Mr. S. Wyatt, speaking on the Psychology of Industrial Life, said: "An interesting feature of life in the weaving shed was the sympathy and co-operation which existed between the operatives. Whenever a weaver had an unusual number of breakages in the cloth she was producing, the operatives in her immediate vicinity immediately came to her assistance. The more skilled workers were always willing to help the less skilled." CONFIDENCE AS A DOCTOR. ~ Professor K. L. Collis said: "Industrial neurasthenia played an important part in every illness which befell a worker, whether due to accident or disease. Such a worker required confidence in the future to enable him to recover. This confidence could only be created by the master he served—industry The size and 'complexity of industrial concerns made the duty of ereaing this confidence a matter to be delegated by the firm to a special branch of management containing within its personnel medical and social experts.'

VICTORY FOR RURAL EUROPE. Mr. T. H. Chapman President of the Economic Section, said: "France's rapid recovery a century ago was largely due to the fact that she was then a rural country, a land of peasants and small farmers, like Serbia or Russia to-day That condition made the economies of demobilisation easy. "The old Europe, if it had its defects, had also the elasticity of a rather primitive economic organism. Given a couple of good harvests, a land of peasants soon recovered from war. Serbia formed an example of this to-day. So it was with France, and to a less extent German}', in 1810-18. If the experience of Europe after Waterloo was on the whole of good augury for agricultural States, for the industrialised modern world that experience was less encouraging." THE COSTLY PENNY. Mr. H. Allcock, in the Economic Section, said:

"The impossibility of decimalising the pound without altering the value of the penny had been responsible for the breakdown of every attempt to secure a decimal system of British coinage. It was obvious that penny prices had been advanced by r>o per cent, to three-half-pence in many cases where a smaller advance would have covered the extra cost, because the unpopularity and scarcity of farthing coins made ljd. an impracticable price stage. The consumer had thus been penalised on a rising market, and he would equally suffer 'in n falling market, because traders would naturally postpone a reduction from lid to Id much longer than from lrfd to a point intermediate between ljd and Id. if such a price could bo paid by one com. The reduction of prices would be hastened by the provision of a new single coin price stage equal to about ljd. in present money, and the only obstacle to tlie decimalisation of the pound sterling would be removed."

THE SURGEON AND ALCOHOL. Captain C'ourtenay C. Weeks, representing the National Temperance League, said "his experiences as a surgeon during the war showed how alcohol used up the reserves of the human frame. Ho was at Malta in November, lftloy when thousands of cases of frost-bite came from (iallipoli. The frost-bite spread with terrible rapidity from the feet of the soldier to the body. It was astonishing how the man who had no alcohol in his system was able to resist the blood poisoning that accompanied the frost-bite. In operations 'the man with alcohol in his blood made a very bad patient. Not only the physical qualities, but character, strength of will, and mental quickness were undermined by the taking of alcohol, evten in doses far short of anything like excess.'

IMPORTANCE OF RESEARCH. I Professor Stanley Gardener said: "Millions of the best of our race owed their lives to the labours of forgotten men of science, who laid the foundations of our knowledge of tlie generations of insects and flat-worms, the modes of life of lice and ticks, and the physiology of lowly creatures. The opening up of our north-western fishing grounds and banks was due to the scientific curiosity of AVyville Thompson and his confreres as to the existence or non-existence of animal life in the deep sea." TO INCREASE COAL OUTPUT Mr. J. O. C.'heetham said: "Tlie means suggested for increasing tlie output of coal wore, more regularity in the attendance of workers at the mines; more extensive use of machinery, such as mechanical haulage and coalcutters; improvement in administration, which, the men contended, could be ell'ec-1 ted if they were given a part in it; the working of double shifts; and a greater intensity of individual ctfort in coalgetting. "Tlie inadequacy of the coal supply to meet the demands of industry was causing great unemployment. Taking shipping alone, he'had been told by the local secretary of the Seamen's and Firemen's Union that 5,000 of their members were unemployed at the various ports ot the Channel." }li'. .1. 11. Davies, a local miner, said "the reduction in the output of coal in South Wales was due to the determination of the younger colliers not. to work us hard as their fathers had worked. They wanted more leisure and more facilities I'or education ami I ravel—in a word, they wanted to live a pleastiiiter and better'life; and hud decided not l» work more than .six hours a day and five days a week. fu his view, the way to increase the output was to introduce more eflicient, machinery and substitute a few large mines for the present large number of small ones."