erfunctory and superficial acquaintance with recent
scientific discovery was not unusual among the upper classes, and the
scientific world was occasionally visited even by the august. These
slender connections have long since withered away. This decline in the
public estimation of science and scientific men has coincided with a
great increase both in the number of scientific students and in the
provision for teaching science. It has occurred also in the period
during which something of the full splendour and power of science has
begun to be revealed. Great regions of knowledge have been penetrated
by the human mind. The powers of man over nature have been multiplied
a hundredfold. The fate of nations hangs literally on the issue of
contemporary experiments in the laboratory; but those who govern the
Empire are quite content to know nothing of all this. Intercommunication
between government departments and scientific advisers has of course
much developed. That, even in this country, was inevitable. Otherwise
the Empire might have collapsed long since. Experts in the sciences
are from time to time invited to confer with heads of Departments and
even Cabinet Ministers, explaining to them, as best they may, the
rudiments of their respective studies, but such occasional
night-school talks to the great are an inadequate recognition of the
position of science in a modern State. Science is not a material to be
bought round the corner by the dram, but the one permanent and
indispensable light in which every action and every policy must be
judged.

To scientific men this is so evident that they are unable to imagine
what the world looks like to other people. They cannot realise that by
a majority of even the educated classes the phenomena of nature and
the affairs of mankind are still seen through the old screens of
mystery and superstition. The man of science regards nature as in
great and ever increasing measure a soluble problem. For the layman
such inquiries are either indifferent and somewhat absurd, or, if they
attract his attention at all, are interesting only as possible sources
of profit. I suspect that the distinction between these two classes of
mind is not to any great degree a product of education.

It is contemporary commonplace that if science were more prominent in
our educational system everybody would learn it and things would come
all right. That interest in science would be extended is probable.
There is in