THE SCIENCE CONGRESS

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1027, 17 January 1911, Page 6

THE SCIENCE CONGRESS

PROFESSOR MASSON'S PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. SOME EXTRACTS FROM THE TAPERS. Scientists of note from all parts of the Commonwealth and the Dominion of New Zealand gathered at the Sydney University on January 9 to inaugurate the thirteenth session of tho Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science- Tho (lay's proceedings were of necessity largely formal, being confined to a meeting of the council, the assembling of certain of the sections to listen to presidential addresses, a garden party, ana the delivering by tho president '(Professor Orme Masson, of Melbourne) of his address, which took pl.iie in tho Great Hall of the University m tho evening. "National progress," said Professor Masson, in the course of liis address, "indeed, the progress of man, depends on the advancement of science; but I would not be understood to mean by this that all progress is necessarily material. Too often, 1 think, people take us in this sense; and perhaps it is sometimes our own fault that they confuse 6cienco> with useful inventions or processes which result from the application of science to practical problems. There are, of course, important, inevitable, and heartily welcome. But. science itself is the true knowledge of the .workings'of nature, and any new glimpse of the truth is its advancement. And who can doubt that man's progress on the mental and moral side is as de-' pendent as his material well-being on this search for truth? < ' " "Tho older universities of Australasia, said Professor.Masson in conclusion, "are growing, and new ones are arising, as in Brisbane and Perth. Naturally and inevitably there is a tendency nowadays to ask of universities a greatly increased attention to tho more utilitarian developments of science. It is so in England, where, for instance, the University ot Sheffield devotes a great department to. the metallurgy of iron, and that of Leeds cultivates, its schools .of textile fabrics, dyeing, and domestic economy. It is so in Australia, where there is' a steady pressure put upon the universities to develop increasingly on the lines of technical schools. AH'this is, doubtless, as it must be;-but"it is beset with a certain/danger. Tho risk .is that the whole energies of these,institutions, where teachers are always too few and equipment is never too plentiful, will bo directed towards the useful anplications of science, and scienco itself will be neglected. ■ This, if it occurs, will be a nitiful result, and will not tend to raise Australia among tho' intellectual countries of the world. Let us be a practical people, and have due regard to utility ; but let us also have some means and loisu'ro, to cultivate the vastly moro interesting inutilities, for thus only can we hope to incrcaso Australasia's contribution to tho true advancement of science." . \ EARTH 300,000,000 YEARS OLD, HOW . LORD. KELVIN WAS MISLED. : In his presidential address before the Astronomical, Mathematical, and Physical Section of the Science Conference, Professor Laby, of New Zealand, showed how the discovery of radium had caused physicists to. modify their previous estimate of. tho age of the earth, and now compute ( it at 300,000,000 years, instead of 40,000,000 as calculated by Lord Kelvin. 110 remarked that in 1868 Lord Kelvin surprised' the Uniformitarian School of Geologists, who saw .■ no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an ending to the earth, by drawing a very decided limit to tho possible age of tho earth. Lord Kelvin then placed • the maximum possiblo sge of . the .earth at. 40,000,000 years,- because assuming that tho earth was olice a molten sphere, the crust would be colder than it is if it. had been cooling for a longer period. Recently Professor Strutt had measured the amount of helium iu the mineral thorianite, and also the rate'at which the helium-is nt>w accumulating. Ho found it would have taken 230,000,000 years for the helium to accumulate. Tho experiment u'as a highly refined and delicate one, but 'there was every reason to believe in its accuracy, and to feel that the antiquity found, for the mineral was based on sound assumptions. As this would make the earth over 300,000,000 years old, how was the calculation to be reconciled with Lord Kelvin's reasoning? The reply was that Lord Kelvin had left out of account a source of heat since discovered—the heat generated by radium, etc., in the earth's crust. This was first pointed out by Rutherford and Soddy. Modern research by Joly arid others, showed an embarrassingly large supply of heat. from this source. It could be safely concluded that the antiquity of tho earth was at the .very least 300 million' years, and in concluding this no violence [was being done .to Lord Kelvin's reasoning, ■ or to the theories of geologists. Biologists also might be able to conceive tho evolution of. many species in such countless time. "THE SCAR LEFT BY THE MOON." ABOUT THE PACIFIC DEPTHS. Professor Marshall, of.Otago University, Dunedin, president of the geographical section of tho Science Congress, lectured on the boundary of Pacific basin. Tiiere were, he said, various theories as to its origin.. It had been suggested that it was tho scar left by the moon when it came away from the earth; that tho hollow had been actually inherent in* the pear-shaped form the earth took on cooling; and that it was a subsidence area which had existed since the Triassic period, that i>art of tho earth's crush laving fallen in owing to shrinkage. It had been supposed that a land bridge existed between New Zealand and South America not so long ago, so as to explain the resemblances, between the flora and fauna of tropical South America and New Zealand. The differences of opinion as to' the age and permanence of the basin were as great as those in regard to its structure. Tho theories (of Dana, Gregory, Suess, and others). were-mainly founded on the possessions of islandgroups over the ocean's surface. It had been suggested that- these groups were the summits of submerged mountain ranges. Their linear arrangements were niore' or less parallel, and it had been therefore further suggested that they wore ranges of a mountain .'chain . in which the dominant trend was west-north-west to east-south-east. But in those theories, little account had been taken of soundings in the snrround--1 ing . ocean, and too much importance should not be paid to tho nrrangemont of volcanic mountains. For if, for instance, tho level of tho North Island of New Zealand were lowered by "000 ft.. a line drawn through the summits of tho only mountains which would then be above the ocean's surface would lie almost at right angles to the true structural axis of tho island. The elevations on the seafloor between the Pacific Islands were still but imperfectly known, though some of their more important features had been revealed by soundings. One of the lines of elovatiou suggested by Suess must pass through the centre of what had . been found in fact to be a deep basin. Nor did tho. coast of New Zealand conform to Subsr statements as to tho structure of coastlines of the Pacific Occaii. Biologists had considered the distribution of plants and animals in the Pacific region. But their speculations varied from Wallace's belief that no changes need have taken place in the past to account for the present distribution of Forbes' construction of an iminenso Continental area iu high southern latitudes. Professor Marshall ended bv saving that little certaintv could be got at present. Structural 'rock, and depth characteristics supported the idea that tho real boundary of tho south-west Pacific passed through New Zealand, Ivermadec, Tonga, Fiji, tho New Hebrides, tho i Solomons, ami tho Admiralty Islands. This supposition practically concluded with biological knowledge, as to plant and animal distributions within the area. The land connections or approximation took place, ho considered, in late Mesosoip or in the Pleistocene times—probably (he latter. Tho eastern Pacific Islands were different in structure, nature, and origin from the lands on this line, and had been peopled by chance immigrants from them. The keen controversies upon all matters of interest to' New Zealand geology were, howover, only to bo expected. The land was so isolated, and the views of geologists had been largely based upon other countries. But at the next meeting of tho congress there should be more knowledge available, for thero was at present a movement on foot groups of islands in the Pacific, and to gather material for a better scientific description than there had been so far,