spend as much as 20,000 to 60,000 a year on research work. In this State, our engineering and manufacturing enterprises are, as a rule, too small to be able to provide research departments of their own, and for that very reason,a well-equipped University laboratory is of the more importance, for it could give assistance in many difficulties.
During the war I visited a large workshop near Melbourne, where an attempt had been made to start in Australia the manufacture of copper tubes, then unobtainable from abroad. A plant was erected at a cost of several thousands of pounds, the very purest electrolytic copper, containing as much as 99.9 per cent, of pure copper, was purchased, expert workmen were engaged, but the tubes could not be drawn. For some reason the copper was not sufficiently ductile. For nine months experiments were tried, and a great deal of money was spent without success. As a last resort, a young Melbourne graduate was employed, who had given special attention to the examination of metals by the metallurgical microscope. He found that the slight impurity present consisted of oxygen united with the copper as an oxide. Cuprous oxide contains about 11 per cent, of oxygen, and in this case it was present chiefly in the form of minute layers in between layers of pure copper, forming a structure known as the eutectic. The result was that although the oxygen formed less than 0.1 per cent, of the whole, the eutectic, in which the oxide was intimately woven, formed as much as 20 per cent, of the whole. Now cuprous oxide is not ductile, and the eutectic in consequence was a brittle structure. Moreover, it arranged itself round the boundaries of the pure copper crystals so as to destroy their cohesion. Here then was the cause of the trouble, and the problem was to destroy the structure of the eutectic. Experiment showed that this could be done by a special treatment that induced the oxide particles to form into globules, so that when the metal solidified it did so prac-
