GIFTS FROM SCIENCE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 62, Issue 4404, 19 March 1941, Page 7

GIFTS FROM SCIENCE

VALUE TO MANKIND. “ The ideal man is the complete man,” said Viscount Sameifl in an address to industrial chemists. “ If he is to have knowledge, family associations, and friendship, opportunity for thought and for action, freedom, he needs first the physical basis forthese. He needs a home, nutriment, health, a secure livelihood, access to learning, a right environment—yes, and in these times of lawless violence he needs as well the means to defend that way of life. “ All these’ are in the sphere of things. The material is the necessary basis for the immaterial; sec-

ondary it may be, but certainly indispensable. So we reach the conviction that applied science is worth while; not only for what its achievements are in themselves, but for the sake of the ends that they make possible. This will stand out very plainly if we imagine for a moment physical science wiped out and try to measure the loss. “ Medicine, preventive and curative, is part of applied science. All the diseases that have been struck out of the catalogue of human life would return again; surgery would be crude and agonising; where one infant dies to-day three would die; the average span of life would be greatly shortened . Scientific agriculture is part of it; the abundance everywhere that is now within our grasp would fade away; scarcity and famine would bring back penury and death.”