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SCIENCE AND THE GREAT WAR
7

essential thing which the leader must secure first of all as a foundation for everything else, it is revealed as something outside, something to be neglected until the nuisance of listening to its demands becomes more intolerable than the nuisance of acceding to them. And this, I am afraid, is too often a true picture of the attitude of the Government and the public opinion of the country towards science.

Professor Perkin has shown, in this year's presidential address[1] to the Chemical Society, that the coal-tar industry, founded on the discoveries made by his father, now leads to our annual purchase of colouring matters to the value of £2,000,000, of which 90 per cent, comes from Germany; furthermore, that these dyes are essential to our textile industries, representing at least £200,000,000 per annum and employing 1,500,000 workers. He traces the decline of the coal-tar industry and its gradual transference to Germany, beginning during the period 1870–5, to the insufficient number of first-rate British chemists necessary for developing the existing processes, and especially for the all-important work of making new discoveries.

The same failure is apparent in other industries, as was shown by Professor Perkin in his evidence before the consultative Committee of the Board of Education—-

  1. The whole address should be carefully studied, as also the lecture delivered in Oxford by Professor Meldola in 1903 (Nature, Aug. 27, 1903, p. 398). I cannot forbear to speak of the grievous loss which the country has just sustained in the recent death of this great man. Meldola was the one scientific man to whom we were looking for guidance in the period of reconstruction after the war. And he was to have occupied a position in which his great knowledge of science and industry would have had full scope, having been appointed on the council of the recent 'Scheme for the Organization and Development of Scientific and Industrial Research'.