Welsh Journals

after operations has fallen from over 60 per cent to under 5 per cent, and this is the more extraordinary when we consider that operations are now confidently under- taken which, by the surgeons of a previous generation, would have been regarded as impossible. Had it not been for the researches of these men, many of us now living would have already joined the majority. Here the connection between the labourer and the result of his labours is close and evident, but, as I have previously indicated, such is rarely the case. The discoverer of the Rontgen rays could scarcely have anticipated their appli- cation in the battlefield and the hospital. And as little could the Curies, in their work on the isolation of radium and its com- pounds, have imagined that, in a few years, our most hopeful prospect of fighting the painful disease to which one in every twelve of us seems fated to succumb, was to be found in the application of the pro- perties of radium. Who would have supposed that when Thompson and Joule in 849 were engaged in determining the fall in temperature of a gas under high pressure, when issuing from a fine orifice, they were, not only enabling mankind to secure a greater efficiency in all heat engines, but were also laying the foundations of those industries by which we are now able to apply almost unlimited stores of oxygen to many and varied manufactures, and rendering it possible, by mechanical refrigeration, to deliver the meat of Australia and South Africa and the fruits of the Tropics at the doors of the working men of this country ? The biologists, who devoted their en- ergies-and sometimes their lives-to the study of the mosquito, could have had little conception that they would be the chief contributors to the successful con- struction of the Panama Canal. In The Times of October 13th, 1913, it was stated that 521 souls were saved from the wreck of the Volturno, and it was added that none of these would have been saved but for wireless telegraphy. I wonder if any of those 521 souls have ever given a thought to the labours of Hertz The story is an endless one. As we glance back at those great names of the past-Pasteur and Faraday, Hertz and Humphrey Davy, Kelvin and Lister, Darwin and Huxley,­the question arises Will the coming generation be able to produce their peers ? There are those who seem to think that the field of inquiry is exhausted, that our march has been so rapid and our advance so great, that there is little territory left to explore. Such, I have no doubt, has been the thought of each succeeding generation. But the ac- quisition of natural knowledge is like the growth of a rolling snowball, in that the greater its mass, the more rapid its accre- tion. Some time ago, when I was advocating increased opportunity for research in matters connected with the mining industry, I heard a gentleman closely associated with that business remark We don't want more research, we are practical men." The fearful calamity which has recently plunged South Wales into mourning makes a refutation of such a statement unnecessary. As well might the navi- gators of the last century have said that there was no need for researches such as those of Hertz. I suppose that many, if they look back on their early years, will remember, (if I can judge their ambitions by my own) that the profession they would have selected, had choice been given them, would have been that of a pirate or a treasure hunter. In both cases the desire was the same, viz.: that of adventure and discovery. I would think little of a lad