PROFESSOR BICKERTON

Otago Witness, Issue 3489, 25 January 1921, Page 62

PROFESSOR BICKERTON

A FEW THINGS. JIE WANTS TO KNOW. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, November 18. Professor A. W. Bickerton, president of the London Astronomical Society, is delivering a series of lectures before an audience of Fellows of the Royal Botanic Society. To-day he is speaking on “The Relations of Astronomy to Botany,” illustrated with experiments, models, and specimens. A few days ago Professor Bickerton instanced some examples of unsolved problems of science, asking among other questions: Why can you roast, an ox on the ice of the Thames one year and other years see no ice there at all? Why do we get evidence of tropical life (coral) sometimes at the North Pole and ice in the Mediterranean? How did mankind get to all corners of the earth ? What is the cause of exploding suns? He contended that if the experts of the different sciences were to work in greater unity, many unsolved problems could be cleared up. Referring to the fact that he had received his first lessons in science from a blacksmith named Aloses Pullen, Piofessor Bickerton said there was a need for clever artisans to learn the sciences and pass the most wonderful knowledge on to their fellow artisans. “ One can understand a man such as Aloses Pullen being interested in science,” he declared, “ for, in mending a pump or anything, the thoughtful worker is in contact with Nature.” Of Moses Pullen he has since said he was 1 one of the finest science masters under whom T ever studied, the village blacksmith turned schoolmaster, and it was he who taught me the value of practical teaching as compared with the merely academic. His rough-and-ready methods got right down to the very bones and marrow of big basic principles. However abstruse the problem in hand, he had no difficulty in presenting it so clearly that almost any dunderhead could understand the subject and keep a grip on it. “When I became a science master myself. one of the first things I did was to get as my assistants the postmaster and an apprentice from Moses Pullen’s village of Painswick, in Gloucestershire They helped me tremendously, and out of these classes, taught hy clever artisans, arose the technical instruction classes for tho whole of London.”