crease of output by research, and when industrial corporations spend millions annually in their research laboratories, we may be sure that the leaders of the industries that still apply old processes will soon awaken. An important division of the Research Council devotes its whole attention to this problem, demonstrating by examples drawn from the practice of leading industries that no expenditure is more profitable than that which is made for research. And when all our great corporations realize that they can cheapen and improve their products by research, a reciprocal advantage to fundamental science will follow.

The

3. The purpose of the National Academy differs materially from that of the vast number of special societies that have advanced science by specialization. In the very nature of the case such concentration develops narrowness of view, and the isolated worker fails to see clearly the vast territory lying beyond his own. specialist should be brought into touch with the great variety of instruments and methods devised by workers in other fields, for in scores of cases they are directly applicable in his own. The members of the Academy are leading investigators, covering all branches of science and vigorously exchanging ideas.

It was in researches for military purposes during the Civil War that the Academy had its origin. Serious reversals had left small room for overconfidence, and taught the necessity of utilizing every promising means of strengthening the Northern arms. With one or two exceptions, the great scientific bureaus of the government, now so powerful, had not come into existence. Leaders of science and engineering recognized the need of a national organization, embracing the whole range of science, to advise the government. A bill to incorporate the Academy was passed by Congress in February, 1863. The Academy thus assisted the government in various problems connected with the Civil War just as the Paris Academy of

Sciences aiding in stamping out civil war after the French Revolution.

4. After the Civil War the government continued to call upon the Academy for advice on a great variety of problems. Reports were submitted on such questions as electrical units, instructions for the Polaris expeditior, the protection of coal-mines, the erection of a new naval observatory, the inauguration of a national forest policy, scientific explorations of the Philippines, etc. Such information can now be obtained frequently from the numerous scientific bureaus of the government. But it still remains true that questions of broad scope, especially those requiring the cooperation of scientific authorities representing several fields of knowledge, can be best dealt with by such an independent and unbiased body as the National Academy.

Hundreds of problems were successfully attacked by the Academy during the World War in cooperation with the War and Navy Departments. The National Research Council consists of the representatives of 56 scientific bodies, together with representatives of the government and certain members at large. I wish space permitted me to describe its numerous activities since the war. Committees of the leading investigators meet from time to time to compare methods and results, and to prepare broad surveys of the existing knowledge and the most promising opportunities for further research. Another mode of advancing research is the establishment of National Research Fellowships in physics, chemistry, and medicine, for those who have shown exceptional promise in their university work.

To appreciate the possibilities of the many activities that will focus in this building, and to realize their significance to human progress, we must briefly discern the true place of science in any intelligent scheme of national development. Man was orce in abject fear of nature, and in his superstitious ignorance deified the wind and the thunder, and peopled the air with evil spirits, whom he propitiated by sacrifice. Today, taught by science, he analyzes the lightning, and uses its essence in the industrial arts. He navigates the air in the face of furious gales. Instead of fearing nature he now subdues her to serve his needs. Manifold increase in the production of the soil, the rapid conquest of disease, the creation and development of industries and the reduction in cost of daily necessities, all these and much more we owe to science, whose work for humanity has only just begun.

Scrib. M., N. '22.

HOMAS G. ALLEN has built in

England what Sir Oliver Lodge

declares to be one of the greatest inventions of all time-the hydrautomat-which by joint application of the weight of a column of water and atmospheric pressure, induces the water of streams to "lift itself by its bootstraps" to almost any desired altitude. No source of power is used other than what nature furnishes.

So epochal is his invention that Mr. Allen has been invited by the United States Bureau of Weights and Measures to demonstrate it in Washington. Engineers declare that the hydrautomat will tap new and almost unlimited sources of water, reclaim thousands of acres of arid land and develop enormous supplies of power from sluggish rivers-all at trifling

expense.

Daniel F. Comstock, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has just made possible the greatest advance in the art of motion pictures since its birth-that of successfully coloring the film. The achievement is the culmination of seven years' work, during which time Professor Comstock arrived at no less than seven different processes, all of which were found useless in practice but valuable in the final results they led to.

In the world's first large-scale attempt to provide systematized accommodations for the touring motorist at the end of each day's trip, a chain of 20 modern hotels, in which every suite of rooms will have its own private garage, is now being established on the Pacific Coast. The immense project comes as a striking indication of how travel is swinging back from the railroads to the highways.

These elaborate hostelries will serve automobile tourists along 2,700 miles of paved highway between Vancouver, B. C., and San Diego, Calif. Each of the highway hotels will stand on a four-acre lot. Forming a hollow square inclosing a large courtyard, will be built low, one-story fireproof bungalows, all under one roof. In the central courtyard will be garages, a camp-fire space, radio receiving station. Hotel charges will be $2 a night for one-room apartment; $3 for two-room apartment, and $4 for fourroom apartment.

Will the "talking thread" soon revolutionize our present methods of letter correspondence? When "writing" to distant friends, shall we merely send them spools of cellulose string which, when placed on a reproducing mechanism, will speak our words just as we said them?

The perfection of a remarkably economical "talking thread" dictating device even now promises a distinct advance in the dictation of business correspondence. It is being used successfully in a number of business offices.

The machine, designed by a Swiss inventor, is both a recorder and reproducer of dictation. The vibrations of the voice are impressed on a cellulose thread, which becomes a permanent record, taking up comparatively small space. The threads are said to mark a distinct advantage over the bulkier disk and cylinder dictation records now in general use. fact, a thread record containing impressions of a speech of hundreds of words can be wound in a neat coil that is small enough to be inclosed in the average envelope used in personal correspondence.

In

Scientists have held that plant growth is due principally to heat, but recently, experts of the Department of Agriculture have discovered that it is really the number of hours of daylight that controls the reproductive processes of plants. The government experiments hold forth the hope that scientists may not only invent beautiful new flowers and vegetables, but that our homes may be enriched the year round with fresh vegetables now denied to us except at certain

seasons.

The iris, which commonly flowers in May and June, will not bloom under hothouse conditions in winter, even though May and June temperature conditions are reproduced. The chrysanthemum, even in a chamber artificially cooled to an October temperature, will not bloom in midsummer. Yet, when the secret of light control was discovered, the iris, grown in hothouses strung with electric lamps that artificially lengthened the day by six hours, was made to bloom in winter; while by producing artificially the daylight period of October, chrysanthemums were made to blossom in midsummer.

The scientists have proved that if a plant is prevented from flowering by keeping it from attaining the proper daylight period, it will remain blossomless until its required normal light period is regained. Lettuce, radishes, or spinach, for example, go to seed under normal conditions, yet when their days are shortened artificially, they remain blossomless. The significant fact here is that vegetables which are now delicacies because they go to seed when hot weather arrives, may be kept from doing so by regulating their daylight period.

Perhaps the most far-reaching result of the tests is the use of artificial light regulation for plant breeding. Heretofore, plant breeders have been unable to make desired cross breeds, because of their inability to eliminate differences in time of flowering of the two parental flowers.

Artificial light control will make it possible to synchronize their blooming periods.

In their relentless war on microbe bred disease, scientists now have at their disposal a powerful new weapon in the form of a marvelous miscroscope that by employing invisible ultra-violet rays, makes microbes look like elephants. The importance of the new instrument, perfected by Dr. J. S. Barnard, in charge of the British National Institute of Medical Research, lies in the fact that it shows sharply the living microbe 12 times larger than do other microscopes, which, in addition, reveal the tiny disease breeders only as dyed and shriveled corpses.

For years the microscope has been limited to an enlargement of a million times, whereas the new instrument magnifies 12,250,000 times!

The opinion has long been held that, sooner or later, the invention of destructive war machinery would reach such a point as to render a league against war amongst the nations an absolute necessity. The rumored jam jar full of high explosive which could wipe out a whole city may not yet be an actual fact, but the latest air invention reported from France must incline the militarist to throwing up the sponge. It is the unpiloted bombing machine. At almost any distance, apparently, from "the objective," in a comfortable easy chair in a comfortable room sits a man before a set of ivory keys. Drawn up in field without are some twenty, say, pilotless bombers. He presses one key, and the bombers rise in the air; he presses another, and they take flight, east, west, north or south, as the circumstances may require. Then by means presumably of charts and other devices, he steers his fleet until it hovers over its quarry. And another key effects a release of the bombs, and the battle is over. So passes "the glory of war," indeed.-International Interpreter.

TH

HE devastating effect of even a brief propaganda of hatred can be most easily studied in the Germany of the last forty years. Until the World War England and Germany had never spilled each other's blood.

The propaganda against England began, according to Bismarck, in 1885. In his memoirs he tells us that he feared the influence of the wife of Frederick, the daughter of Queen Victoria. He therefore used certain newspapers to attack England. In January, 1900, the Cologne "Gazette" said:

"Those who carry their memories back to a decade or so ago will remember the widespread indignation which the Cologne "Gazette' aroused by its continued and persistent attacks upon England. A sentimental enthusiasm for the sea-girt land of freedom was then prevalent among educated classes of Germany. At that time there were only a few German politicians who called attention to the obvious consideration that this state of feeling might easily, in certain circumstances, have quite disastrous consequences under a weaker conduct of Imperial affairs exposed to English influence."

To prevent this, a group of German newspapers was incited to arouse hatred of everything English. the Cologne "Gazette" said:

As

"At that time it was a national duty to create an anti-English feeling strong enough to sway the balance against the dangers of a hazy policy guided by popular feeling. It was then that those anti-English catchwords were coined and put into cir

culation, with which the air of Germany now re-echoes, although they have long since ceased to be applicable."

To further the opposition to England the Cologne Gazette" moreover urged Russia to consider the opportunity arising from the Boer War in these words:

"It is Russia's business to consider whether and in what manner she will take advantage of England's embarassments."

The effect of this anti-English propaganda was very evident during the Boer War.

In 1914, Count Reventlow published a book entitled, "Deutschland's Auswartige Politik, 1888-1913," and on page 171 he says:

"The feeling in Germany was strengthened and embittered by the violent attacks which public opinion continued to direct against British policy in South Africa, and the manner in which the war was conducted. In this outburst there joined together at once and over-flowed all the accumulations of the last ten years in the feeling that the nation had been insulted, in recollections of real or supposed political failure. The voluminous literature of these years shows, one might say, on every page the thought and the hope that one day the reckoning with England would come."

Professor Delbruck, Editor of the Prussiche "Yahrbuch," said in January, 1900:

"Today all German parties are united in rejoicing at English defeats. Public meetings censure the Government for not intervening in favor of

the Boers, and urge the Emperor not to carry out his intention of going to England."

Yet the writer avows that:

"Germany today might very well be friends with the world at large." Anti-English meetings were held all over Germany. One at Gottingen in September, 1899, expressed sympathy for the Boers and used these words:

Not because the Boers were entirely in the right, but because we Germans must take sides against England.

in December, 1899, General Buller was defeated by the Boers before Colenso. He lost nearly two whole batteries of field guns, and Lord Roberts' only son was killed while trying to save them. On the arrival of the report of this disaster, the German Hong-Kong Club gave banquet to the German community. Resounding cheers issued from the banqueting hall, and the club house was illuminated with colored lights.

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Dr. Delbruck told his countrymen that: "The insults with which the English army and the English national character were at that time (during the Boer War) bespattered, not in the German press only, but in the Reichstag, were so excessively gross that one could scarcely take it amiss if the English bore a grudge against us on their account."

A keen observer thus summarizes the situation in 1900:

Germans are in general of a peaceful disposition, and in that matter there is no difference between the inhabitants of Berlin and those of the provinces. But if the question were put in Berlin, "Which nation would you like best to thrash?" ninety-eight per cent of the residents would reply, "The English."

In less than thirty years a marvelous, varied propaganda, a propaganda at its source (as we have seen) entirely and frankly unscrupulous of the truth, had led Germany to a frenzied animosity accurately expressed in Lissauer's notorious "Hymn of Hate:" You we will hate with a lasting hate, We will never forego our hate, Hate of seventy millions choking down. We love as one, we hate as one, We have one foe, and one alone-England!

I want you women nursing your children to feed them with a hatred of the governing classes of England.

Is that good advice, or is it the advice of John Redmond, for nearly 30 years the Irish leader for Home Rule, who, referring to the wrongs of one or two hundred years ago, said:

But do let us be sensible and truthful people. Do let us remember that we today of our generation are a free people.

I

In my article on "Some Delusions About Ireland," in the June "McClure's," I showed briefly how the prevalent delusions of the Irish people, and the mania of persecution from which they suffer, have been so easily transferred to America. referred to the dispatch sent by the Associated Press from Paris, under date of June 30, 1919, on the authority of ex-Governor Dunne of Illinois and Frank P. Walsh, absurdly stating that the British were bombing Irish villages from airplanes and murdering women and children.

3. The legend that Henry Ford met serious opposition from England in establishing his factory at Cork is part of the huge body of delusions that have made the Irish question a