PURE SCIENCE.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 45, Issue 13754, 5 February 1919, Page 5

PURE SCIENCE.

WORK OF BRITISH PIONEERS.

(By Telegraph—Press Association.) CIIRISTCIIURCH, Tuesday.

At the civic reception to the Science Congress delegates to-day, Dr. L. Cockayne, president of the New Zealand Institute, in acknowledging the welcome, said that the public, while expressing its appreciation of applied science, failed often to recognise the value of pure science, and to see that without pure science there could be no applied science at all.

Commenting on the statement that the British Empire, up to the present, had not done her scientific duty, Dr. Cockayne expressed himself as strongly opposed to that view. No nation had done its scientific duty so worthily as the glorious British Empire, of which they were citizens. Certain names of very great scientific men w-ere household names. Need he mention Sir Isaac Newton, and, in later times, Michael Faraday, without whose discoveries there could have been no frozen meat industry in New Zealand to-day? Yet he did not *se a single statue of Michael Faraday" in this Dominion. And what of Charles Darwin, that great man who had revolutionised tho science of life?