Some Possible Discoveries - Page 2

convenient, healthier and prettier substances, and the young
architect will become increasingly the intelligent student of novelty.
The steam engine, the coal yard, and the tail chimney, and indeed all
chimneys, will vanish quietly from our urban landscape. The speeding up
and cheapening of travel, and the increase in its swiftness and comfort
will go on steadily--widening experience. A more systematic and
understanding social science will be estimating the probable growth and
movement of population, and planning town and country on lines that
would seem to-day almost inconceivably wise and generous. All this means
a quiet broadening and aeration and beautifying of life. Utopian
requirements, so far as the material side of things goes, will be
executed and delivered with at last the utmost promptness....

It is in quite other directions that the scientific achievements to
astonish our children will probably be achieved. Progress never appears
to be uniform in human affairs. There are intricate correlations between
department and department. One field must mark time until another can
come up to it with results sufficiently arranged and conclusions
sufficiently simplified for application Medicine waits on organic
chemistry, geology on mineralogy, and both on the chemistry of high
pressures and temperature. And subtle variations in method and the
prevailing mental temperament of the type of writer engaged, produce
remarkable differences in the quality and quantity of the stated result.
Moreover, there are in the history of every scientific province periods
of seed-time, when there is great activity without immediate apparent
fruition, and periods, as, for example, the last two decades of
electrical application, of prolific realisation. It is highly probable
that the physiologist and the organic chemist are working towards
co-operations that may make the physician's sphere the new scientific
wonderland.

At present dietary and regimen are the happy hunting ground of the quack
and that sort of volunteer specialist, half-expert, half-impostor, who
flourishes in the absence of worked out and definite knowledge. The
general mass of the medical profession, equipped with a little
experience and a muddled training, and preposterously impeded by the
private adventure conditions under which it lives, goes about pretending
to the possession of precise knowledge which simply does not exist in
the world. Medical research is under-endowed and stupidly endowed, not
for systematic scientific inquiry so much as for the unscientific
seeking of remedies for specific evils--for cancer, consumption, and the
like. Yet masked, misrepresented limited and hampered, the work of
establishing a sound science of vital processes in health and