Science: Savants

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Women's barber shops call themselves beauty parlors. Drug stores call themselves ice cream parlors. Clerks call themselves salesmen. Politicians call themselves statesmen. Flappers call themselves young ladies. But scientists call themselves scientists, and only newspapers call them savants.

But the word "savants" has been spread in the headlines of newspapers for the greater part of the week. What this signified was that some 2,000 hardworking men of science were assembled at Toronto at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The Association, which makes a practice of meeting everywhere save in London—in order to stimulate interest elsewhere—gathered to its meeting more than 500 British scientists, about the same number each of Canadians and Americans, and a scattering number from the rest of the world. The presence of Americans was, indeed, due to the fact that the British Association very thoughtfully gave the members of the American Association of the same name membership in the British Association for the purpose of the meeting.

¶ The meeting was opened at Toronto University by Major-General Sir David Bruce, President of the Association. During the War he served in the British Army. At present he is Chairman of the Governing Body of Lister Institute* of Preventive Medicine. He argued that medicine must change its tactics, take the offensive against disease, instead of waiting for 'disease to attack. He was enthusiastic about the work of the Rockefeller Foundation in attacking the sources of the hookworm disease, yellow fever and malaria. He told how sleeping sickness had been eliminated in Uganda by control of the tsetse fly, and how nagana, or Texas fever, had been similarly controlled in Zululand, when it was found that the same fly was the carrier.

¶ John W. Gregory, President of the Geographical Section of the Association, spoke on the "Color" problem of the earth, in which the white race, com posed of some 520,000,000 out of a total population of about 1,700,000,000, controls eight-ninths of the habitable earth. He suggested that there were four possible solutions of the color problem: 1) amalgamation by miscegenation; 2) coresidence without fu sion; 3) 'disfranchisement of the col ored population; 4) segregation into separate communities. He inclined to the belief that the last will be the solution, and foresaw that in 100 years or so, by natural processes, a sort of free state of Negroes would develop in the Southern U. S. C Dr. Frank C. Shrubsall, President of the Anthropological Section of the As sociation, declared that there has been no deterioration of human physique during the historical period, that, furthermore, man's expectation of life has grown by leaps and bounds. A child of five in ancient Egypt might expect to live to be 35; a child of five in Rome of the Caesars might expect to live to be 29; a child of five in London today may expect to live to be 64.