Science and Morals and Other Essays

M.A., M.D., Sc.D., LL.D., F.R.S., F.S.A., K.S.G. OF ST. MICHAEL'S COLLEGE, TORONTO, ONT.
LONDON BURNS & OATES, LTD 28 ORCHARD STREET, W 1919
TO
JOHN ROBERT and MARY O'CONNELL
A TOKEN OF SINCERE FRIENDSHIP
Listarkin September 1919
THESE Essays have all in one form or another appeared elsewhere; and I have to thank the Editors of the Dublin Review , Catholic World , America , and Studies respectively for kind permission to reproduce them. Some of them appear as they were published, others have been almost rewritten.
B. C. A. W.

In the days before the war the Annual Address delivered by the President of the British Association was wont to excite at least a mild interest in the breasts of the reading public. It was a kind of Encyclical from the reigning pontiff of science, and since that potentate changed every year there was some uncertainty as to his subject and its treatment, and there was this further piquant attraction, wanting in other and better-known Encyclicals, that the address of one year might not merely contradict but might even exhibit a lofty contempt for that or for those which had immediately preceded it.
During the three years immediately preceding the war we had excellent examples of all these things. In the first of them we were treated to a somewhat belated utterance in opposition to Vitalism. Its arguments were mostly based upon what even to the tyro in chemistry seemed to be rather shaky foundations. Such indeed they proved to be, since the deductions drawn from the behaviour of colloids and from Leduc's pretty toys were promptly disclaimed by leading chemists in the course of the few days after the delivery of the address.
The addresses, however, were not solely concerned with throwing contempt upon views which were yesterday of great respectability, and which even to-day are as gospel to many. They devoted themselves chiefly to the consideration of the question of heredity, viewed, as might be expected, from the Mendelian standpoint.