among the various distributing societies. This need is especially urgent at the present time owing to the greatly increased cost of paper, printing, binding, and indeed of every item connected with publication, which expense, of course, ultimately falls upon the various societies and their members. The problem, which has already received some attention from those entrusted with the management of the societies referred to, is not without its difficulties, but these are not insoluble. There is little doubt that a resolute and unanimous effort to find a solution would meet with success. The present high cost of book production, which in the case of specialized books is about three times what it was in 1914, is exercising a most prejudicial effect upon the spread of scientific knowledge. Books on science are not generally among the "best sellers." They appeal to a comparatively limited and not particularly wealthy public, largely composed of the professional classes who have suffered in no small measure from the economic effects

of the war. The present high price of this class of literature is to the public detriment. Eventually it is no less to the detriment of the printing and publishing trades. Publishers are well aware of this fact, and attempts are being made by discussions between employers and the executives of the Typographical Association and other societies of compositors to reach an equitable solution, and it is greatly to be hoped that it will be speedily found.

All thinking men are agreed that science is at the basis of national progress. Science can only develop by research. Research is the mother of discovery, and discovery of invention. The industrial position of a nation, its manufactures and commerce, and ultimately its wealth, depend upon invention. Its welfare and stability largely rest upon the equitable distribution of its wealth. All this seems so obvious, and has been so frequently and so convincingly stated, that it is superfluous to dwell upon it in a scientific gathering to-day.

A late distinguished admiral, you may remember, insisted on the value of reiteration. On this particular question it was never more needed than now. The crisis through which

we have recently passed requires it in the interests of national welfare. Of all post-war problems to engage our serious attention, none is more important in regard to our position and continued existence than the nation's attitude toward science and scientific research, and there is no more opportune time than the present in which to seek to enforce the teaching of one of the most pregnant lessons of our late experience.

It is, unfortunately, only too true that the industrial world has in the past underrated the value of research. One indication that the nation is at length aroused to its importance is to be seen in the establishment of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, with its many subordinate associations. The outbreak of the Great War, and much in its subsequent history, revealed, as we all know, many national shortcomings, due to our indifference to and actual neglect of many things which are at the root of our prosperity and security. During the war, and at its close, various attempts, more or less unconnected, were made to find a remedy. Of the several committees and boards which were set up, those which still exist have now been coordinated, and brought under the control of a central organization-the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Research has now become a national and state-aided object. For the first time in our history its pursuit with us has been organized by government action. As thus organized it seeks to fulfil the aspirations to which I have referred, whilst meeting many of the objections which have been urged against the endowment of research. It must be recognized that modern ideas of democracy are adverse to the creation of places to which definite work is not assigned and from which definite results do not emanate. This objection, which strikes at the root of the establishment of such an institution as Sir David Brewster contemplated, is, to a large extent, obviated by the scheme of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. It does not prescribe or fetter research, but, whilst aiding by personal payments the individual worker, leaves him free to pursue his inquiry

as he thinks best. Grants are made, on the recommendation of an advisory council of experts, to research workers in educational institutions and elsewhere, in order to promote research of high character on fundamental problems of pure science or in suitable cases on problems of applied science. Of the boards and committees and similar organizations established prior to or during the war, or subsequent to it, with one or two exceptions, all are now directly under the department. They deal with a wide range of subjects, such as the Building Research Board, established early in 1920 to organize and supervise investigations on building materials and construction, to study structural failures, and to fix standards for structural materials. The Food Investigation Board deals with the preservation by cold of food, and with the engineering problems of cold storage, with the chemistry of putrefaction, and the agents which induce it, with the bionomics of moulds, and the chemistry of edible oils and fats. The Fuel Research Board is concerned with the immediate importance of fuel economy and with investigations of the questions of oil-fuel for the navy and mercantile marine, the survey of the national coal resources, domestic heating, air pollution, pulverized fuel, utilization of peat, the search for possible substitutes for natural fuel oil, and for practicable sources of power alcohol.

The Geological Survey Board has taken over the Geological Survey of Great Britain and the control of the Museum of Practical Geology. The maintenance of the National Physical Laboratory, originally controlled by a general board and an executive committee appointed by the president and council of the Royal Society, is now transferred to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. A Mines Research Committee and a Mine Rescue Apparatus Committee are attached to the department. The former is concerned with such questions as the determination of the geothermic gradient, the influence of temperature of intake and return air on strata, the effect of seasonal changes on strata temperature of intakes, the cooling effect due to the evolution of fire-damp, heat production from the oxi

dation of timber, etc. The department is also directing inquiries on the preservation and restoration of antique objects deposited in the British Museum. It is concerned with the gauging of rivers and tidal currents, with special reference to a hydrographical survey of Great Britain in relation to the national resources of water-power. In accordance with the government policy, four coordinating boards have been established to organize scientific work in connection with the fighting forces, so as to avoid unnecessary overlapping and to provide a single direction and financial control. The four boards deal, respectively, with chemical and physical problems, problems of radio-research, and engineering. These boards have attached to them various committees dealing with special inquiries, some of which will be carried out at the National Physical Laboratory. The government have also authorized the establishment of a Forest Products Research Board.

The department is further empowered to assist learned or scientific societies and institutions in carrying out investigations. Some of these were initiated prior to the war, and were likely to be abandoned owing to lack of funds. Whenever the investigation has a direct bearing upon a particular industry that had not hitherto been able to establish a research association, it has been a condition of a grant that the institution directing the research should obtain contributions towards the cost on a £ for £ basis, either directly through its corporate funds or by special subscriptions from interested firms. On the formation of the appropriate association the research is, under suitable safeguards, transferred to it for continuance. The formation of a number of research associations has thus been stimulated, dealing, for example, with scientific instruments, non-ferrous metals, glass, silk, refractories, electrical and allied industries, pottery, etc.

Grants are made to research associations formed voluntarily by manufacturers for the purposes of research, from a fund of a million sterling, placed at the disposal of the research department for this purpose. Such associa

tions, to be eligible for the grant, must submit articles of association for the approval of the department and the Board of Trade. If these are approved, licenses are issued by the Board of Trade recognizing the associations as limited liability companies working without profits. Subscriptions paid to an association by contributing firms are recognized by the Board of Inland Revenue as business costs of the firms, and are not subject to income or excess profits taxes. The income of the association is similarly free of income tax. Grants are ordinarily made to these associations on the basis of £1 for every £1 raised by the association between limits depending upon the particular industry concerned. In the case of two research associations grants are made at a higher rate than £ for £, as these industries are regarded as having a special claim to state assistance on account of their "pivotal" character. The results of research are the sole property of the association making them, subject to certain rights of veto possessed by the department for the purposes of ensuring that they are not communicated to foreign countries, except with the consent of the department, and that they may be made available to other interested industries and to the government itself on suitable terms.

These arrangements have been found to be generally satisfactory, and at the present time twenty-four of such research associations have been formed to whom licenses have been issued by the Board of Trade. Others are in process of formation, and may be expected to be at work at an early date. These research associations are concerned with nearly all our leading industries. The official addresses of most of them are in London; others have their headquarters in Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham, Northampton, Coventry, Glasgow, and Belfast.

The department has further established a Records Bureau, which is responsible for receiving, abstracting, filing and collating communications from research workers, boards, institutions, or associations related to or supervised by the department. This information is regarded as confidential, and will not be com

municated except in writing, and after consultation with the research worker or organization from which it has been received. Also such non-confidential information as comes into the possession of the department which is of evident or probable value to those working in touch with the department is collected and filed in the bureau and made generally available.

It is also a function of the bureau to effect economy in preventing repetition and overlapping of investigations and in ensuring that the fullest possible use is made of the results of research. Thus, the programmes of research associations are compared in order to ensure that researches are not unwittingly duplicated by different research associations. Sometimes two or more research associations may be interested in one problem from different points of view, and when this occurs it may be possible for the bureau to arrange a concerted attack upon the common problem, each research association undertaking that phase of the work in which it is specially interested and sharing in the general results.

As researches carried out under the department frequently produce results for which it is possible to take out patents, careful consideration has been given to the problems of policy arising on this subject, and other government departments also interested have been freely consulted. As the result, an interdepartmental committee has been established with the following terms of reference:

1. To consider the methods of dealing with inventions made by workers aided or maintained from public funds, whether such workers be engaged (a) as research workers, or (b) in some other technical capacity, so as to give a fair reward to the inventor and thus encourage further effort, to se cure the utilization in industry of suitable inventions and to protect the national interest, and

2. To outline a course of procedure in respect of inventions arising out of state-aided or supported work which shall further these aims and be suitable for adoption by all government departments concerned.

About forty patents have been taken out by the department jointly with the inventors and

other interested bodies, but of these, nine have subsequently been abandoned. At least five patents have been developed to such a stage as to be ready for immediate industrial application.

It will be obvious from this short summary of the activities of the department, based upon information kindly supplied to me by Sir Francis Ogilvie, that this great scheme of state-aided research has been conceived and is administered on broad and liberal lines. A considerable number of valuable reports from its various boards and committees have already been published, and others are in the press, but it is, of course, much too soon to appreciate the full effects of their operations. But it can hardly be doubted that they are bound to exercise a profound influence upon industries which ultimately depend upon discovery and invention. The establishment of the department marks an epoch in our history. No such comprehensive organization for the application of science to national needs has ever been created by any other state. We may say we owe it directly to the Great War. Even from the evil of that great catastrophe there is some soul of goodness would we observingly distil it out. T. EDWARD THORPE (To be concluded)

LIFE IN OTHER WORLDS DOES life especially intelligent life-exist elsewhere than on the earth? Three letters in recent numbers of SCIENCE discuss this ageold problem. And it is noticeable that, as usual, the astronomers take the affirmative and the biologists the negative side of the argument. There may be two reasons for this. 1. Astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, are accustomed to hold a more receptive attitude, an open mind, toward hypotheses that can not be definitely disproved. This frame of mind is natural and adapted to their work. They are accustomed to deal with problems which can be solved by mathematical and deductive methods. A limited number of solutions appear, all of them to be receptively considered until they can be definitely disproved.

The biologist, on the other hand, deals with a different sort of problem. His evidence is almost always inductive, experimental. His subjects are far too complex, too little understood, to admit of mathematical analysis, save in their simpler aspects. And always he is compelled to adopt toward the illimitable numbers of possible explanations, a decidedly exclusive attitude, and to leave out of consideration all factors that have not something in the way of positive evidence for their existence. If he fails to do so, he soon finds himself struggling hopelessly in a bog of unprofitable speculations. A critical rather than a receptive frame of mind is the fundamental condition of progress in his work.

2. The second reason is that the astronomér or cosmologist has in mind when he thinks of this problem, the physical and chemical conditions that would render life possible. If these be duplicated elsewhere he sees life as possible, and by the incidence of the laws of chance probable or almost certain, if they be duplicated often enough. Viewing the innumerable multitude of stars, each of them a solar system with possible or probable planets analogous to our own, he sees such multitudinous duplications of the physical conditions that have made life possible on our earth, that it appears to him incredible that all stand empty and lifeless.

The biologist, on the other hand, has at the forefront of his mind the history and evolution of life on the earth. He knows that although these conditions favoring the creation of living matter have existed on earth for many millions or hundreds of millions of years, yet life has not come into existence on earth save once, or at most half a dozen times, during that time. The living beings on earth are reducible at most to a few and probably to one primary stock, all their present variety being the result of the evolutionary processes of differentiation and adaptation. appear therefore to him that the real conditions for the creation of life on earth have involved, not merely the favoring physical conditions, but some immensely complex concatenation of circumstances so rare that even

It must

on earth it has occurred probably but once during the sons of geologic time. The marvelous complexity of the fundamental substance of life, so complex even in its simplest forms that his most precise and elaborate methods of analysis give him but a partial and tentative comprehension of its real structure, must needs strengthen his concept of the immense complexity of the conditions necessary to its creation and evolution. If these conditions have not been duplicated on earth during the whole of the recorded history of life from the Cambrian down to the present day, it appears to him infinitely less probable that they have been duplicated elsewhere than on the earth.

That the " man in the street" should be sympathetic with the astronomer's rather than the biologist's conclusion is natural enough. The physical probabilities are obvious enough to all; the complexity of life and its conditions he does not realize; nor does he sense the minute relative proportion of time during which intelligent life has existed upon earth, or the vast and impassable barriers of space that preclude the transfer of organized matter from star to star. Moreover, to admit the probability of extra-mundane life opens the way for all sorts of fascinating speculation in which a man of imaginative temperament may revel free from the checks and barriers of earthly realities.

Such life, if it exists, would surely be evolved ab initio on independent lines of adaptation and the probabilities would be overwhelming that the results of the sons of its evolution, if by some rare chance it developed intelligent life simultaneously with its appearance on the earth, would be a physical and intellectual type so different fundamentally from our own as to be altogether incomprehensible to us even if we recognized it as being intelligence or life at all. Who that has studied the ant or the bee has failed to be impressed with the unplumbed mysteries in its sensations, its psychology, its inner life! We are far from any full understanding of the intelligence, if I may use the word, of the social insects, relatives, albeit distant rela

tives, of our own, brought up under the identical environment of terrestrial conditions. How much farther would we be from any comprehension of the intellectual processes of a race of beings whose ultimate origin was wholly different from ours, whose evolution was shaped under conditions that, however closely parallel, could not have been identical with those of the earth. Indeed, if we are to take a receptive attitude in this matter, why limit ourselves to protoplasm as the basis of life? What reason have we to suppose that a selfperpetuating substance, capable of acquiring the heterogeneity of function, the multiple complexity of structural adaptation, the specialization of parts, the elaboration of control and correlation organs, and finally the dominance of these last and development of conscious and intelligent beings, must necessarily be based upon the semi-liquid jelly upon which life, as we know it, is fundamentally based? Other substances, solid, liquid, or even gaseous, may have similar capacities, may have carried them out under different conditioning laws, to a result equally complex and marvelous. We know of nothing of the sort. But would we know of it if it existed, even if it existed upon earth? Would there be any conceivable method of communication, any common ideas, interests, or activities, between such beings and ourselves? It does not appear probable. How much less the probability of communication across the void of interplanetary space.

To suppose that parallel evolution could go so far as to produce similar methods of exploiting the earth to those used by civilized man-irrigation canals, cities, or other such phenomena of the immediate present-in life evolved independently in different planetsand to produce them at an identical moment in geologic time-would seem to be the result of those limitations of constructive or creative thought which are characteristic of myth and fairy-tale, of the anthropomorphic god, or the animal that thinks and talks like a man. Civilized men cannot form any real concept of intelligent life on Mars save in terms of civilized life on earth. Yet, so far as we may judge