Sept. 2 Professor C. E. M. Jead, of London University, is one of those learned men who manages to attract a great deal of attention when he indulges in public utterance, Recently in an address to students at the City of London Vacation Course in Education for Teachers, he declared that the danger to the present civilization was the contrast between the marvel of man's powers and the imbecile ity which he brings to the use of them, "Science," he said, "has given us powers ft for the gods, yet we bring to their use the mentality of public schoolboys and savages." The professor may be a little hard on the public schools, but it is an undeniable fact that there is a tendency in mankind, when discovery is made, immediately to assert What destructive uses can be made of it, Science has provided in abundance the means to the good life, but has not taught man how to live, indeed it seems to be facilitating the grievous business of dying en masse. How many discoveries, innocent enough in their first implications, have been diverted to bad ends? There are so many that the difficulty is to know where to start detailing them, but probably the most destructive invention that the world has seen has been the internal combustion engine, and its present potentialities of death and destruction, Thus "armed with thunder clad with wings," mankind a wider world commands, and it is not entirely for his own good. Thus speaking of the Jacroplane, the lineal descendant of the internal combustion engine, Professor Jond says the "greatest of man's inventions threa-toned his The superman made the aeroplane and the ape Jhad got hold of it." The whole trouble about humanity is that it has become "too clever by half," or, perhaps, it might be stated the other way round that it is only half clever enough. There has been a lop-sided development in the progress of mankind.
For example take the enormous strides made in the matter of production of natural wealth. Man's ingenuity has increased the production of rubber, coffee and Jike com= modities, improvements in fishing methods have resulted in better catches at sea, and because mankind's research in these direc tions has not been paralleled by endeavours to discover means of making use of the greater
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.