At Leeds

The British press received with little comment and no protest the dogmatic assertion of Sir Arthur Keith, president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in session last fortnight at Leeds, that “Darwin was right,” that men and apes had a common ancestor (TIME, Sept. 12).

The Bishop of Ripon, however, preaching in Leeds the following Sunday, made a protest far broader than simple anti-Darwinism. Said he of Science in general: “With all this new mastery over nature, man has not seemed really to be advancing his own cause. . . . Dare I even suggest, at the risk of being lynched by some of my hearers, that the sum of human happiness, outside of scientific circles, would not necessarily be reduced if, for say ten years, every physical and chemical laboratory were closed and the patient and resourceful energy displayed in them transferred to recovering the lost art of geting together and finding a formula for making the ends meet in the scale of human life.”

The Bishop of Ripon was not lynched. But upon his sermon fell the press comments that a few had expected for Sir Arthur Keith’s speech. Said the New York Times, for example: “The Bishop of Ripon can hardly have been serious.” Sir Oliver Lodge said that the good Bishop reminded him of his grandmother, who viewed with alarm railroad trains going 40 m.p.h.

Lodgical Universe. Sir Oliver, onetime (1913-14) president of the Association, had much to say to his colleagues and to the public. He offered his entire private cosmogony, an explanation of the physical universe based upon the inference that there was, in the beginning, and still is, a universal medium, ether, very dense, continuous, all-permeating, boundless, and everywhere in violent motion. Since matter is now known to be pure energy in complicated forms, the origin of matter out of the ether might be accounted for thus: the continuity of the ether was at some time interrupted by “an extremely minute cavity,” a sort of vacuous bubble in equilibrium under the gigantic pressure of the surrounding ether. Sir Oliver pictured this bubble “spinning violently under the influence of the circulation which presumably extracted it.” Such a bubble would have been but a new form of the energy of the ether.

Many such cavities or bubbles formed, explained Sir Oliver. How some acquired characteristics opposite to others, he could not say, but inferred that there were opposites, the positive and negative particles of that form of energy called electricity. Their high speed made mutual penetration difficult. Instead of destroying one another they agglomerated in clusters (atoms, molecules) masses (star dust, worlds, material universes).

Besides the form of energy which thus became matter, Sir Oliver declared that he thought there were other forms—for one, Life; for another, Intelligence. “It seems to me,” he said, “that there is a guiding and directing principle ab extra which interacts with the material of the physical universe but is not of it.” He reiterated his dogmatic assertion that other energetic entities, undreamed of by physical science, were the intuitions of poets, prophets, saints; entities of the realm of spiritism.

Comments. Dr. Michael Idvorsky Pupin, outstanding U. S. electro-mechanist, said: “Sir Oliver Lodge has his ether doing wonderful things. But I don’t believe it does them. … I believe they [electrons] were created by God—building stones for the physical universe, including the earth and all organic life upon it.”

Supernature. For the first time since 1876, psychic research was brought before the Association for official consideration. Dr. Thomas Walker Mitchell made the chief address, telling fellow psychologists: “We may have to revise our notions of what being dead implies. We may have to conceive of the mind of a dead person as persisting in some form that permits it to be still available as a source of knowledge.” He argued the strong case for telepathy, admitted the weak case of clairvoyance.

Relativity. “The whole electromagnetic theory must be re-written,” now that relativity has set up a definite connection between electricity and gravitation. So said Professor Edmund Taylor Whittaker of Edinburg University. He offered some propositions: that if the gravitation of a planet could vary rapidly, an electrified body in the field of attraction would emit radiation; that “gravi-tation simply represents a continued effort of the universe to straighten itself.”

Hormones. Professor C. G. Barger and others discussed them. They are organic chemical compounds in the blood stream, in units of ultramicroscopic size. They actuate bodily organs much as nerves do, but more slowly, requiring to be transported bodily to the organs, like letters, whereas the nerves flash their stimuli like telegrams. The best known hormones: insulin, thyroxin, adrenalin, pituitrin.

Darwin’s Home. Dr. Buckston Browne, London surgeon, offered, and the Association accepted, an endowment to buy and maintain for the nation the homestead of Charles Darwin at Down.

Noctovision. Last year’s tousle-headed John L. Baird* invited members of the Royal Institution to drop in at his London laboratory for a demonstration of television. The two score gentlemen who went were impressed deeply by the ingenuity of Mr. Baird’s “optical lever,” a series of whirling lenses mounted on discs, which break up an optical image into minute constituent parts. They were even more impressed by the Baird photo-electric cell, of the colloidal selenium type, which could capture and transmit the minute image parts at unprecedented speed. Last week, between sessions of the British Association, members sought out Inventor Baird in Leeds to see him manipulate his latest tele-visors, which are now so refined that they can “see things at night.” Using infra-red rays, on the long-wave edge of the spectrum of visible light, and an infra-red-sensitive cell of which Inventor Baird alone knows the secret, the Baird “noc-tovisor” transmits by wire or radio an image of a person sitting in a pitch-dark room. Some of Inventor Baird’s admirers went to London to converse with and look at him, 200 miles away in Leeds in his dark room. They saw his long, hungry face with pince-nez and haystack hair, not perfectly but most recognizably reproduced. Over the telephone they asked him to light a cigaret. He complied, inhaled and blew clouds of smoke —which his interlocutors could not see because infra-red rays penetrate smoke.

The present limitation of nocto-vision, for purposes outside the laboratory, is that the infra-red rays must be supplied by a special searchlight.

International House. The society voted to refuse a request that it contribute funds toward an international house of chemistry, proposed as a centenary memorial to Marcellin Pierre Eugene Berthelot, French chemist and politician, successor to Louis Pasteur as per-petual secretary of the Academy of Sciences. Reason: The request had come, through governmental channels; the American Chemical Society believed that any centralization of world science should be initiated by scientific societies.

*Still in his 30’s, son of a Scotch Presbyterian minister, Inventor Baird has won the esteem of Science after overcoming the inventor’s traditional obstacles, poor health and poverty. After the War, he was on the way to financial independence with a patent waterproof sock. Illness wrecked his plans. His television experiments, begun in 1912, were long pursued in garrets with the homeliest of apparatus—bicycle sprockets, bull’s-eye lenses, biscuit tins, cardboard, string, sealing wax.