SCIENTIST AND MAN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 204, 29 August 1934, Page 6

SCIENTIST AND MAN.

Sir Edgewprth David was more than a great scientist; he was a great .man. When David Syme, the famous proprietor of the Melbourne "Age" died, the "Bulletin" paid him the tribute of publishing a map of Australia with his name printed across it. As a scientist, Professor David deserved a similar compliment, for he made the geology of Australia his subject, and in his old age published a great work on it. But it was not his eminence as a scientist, which was recognised in other countries, that gave him his popular fame; it was the enterprise and the courage as an explorer and a soldier that he displayed in middle age. He was fifty when he went South with Shackleton to make a name for himself in adventure as well as in science, and when the war came, several years later, he organised a Mining Corps, accompanied it to France, and gave the British Army the benefit of his geological knowledge. His was an outstanding personality. The flame of desire for knowledge burnt bright in him until the end. Like many another great man, he regarded old age as a mere inconvenience; life was to be lived to the full in defiance of the years. And with it all went a marked courtesy and consideration for others. He was a modern Ulysses, to whom all experience was an arch through which gleamed a still untravelled and desirable world, and to whom age had its honour and its toil —an example to shame the timorous and the discontented.