meeting of the British Association are being held as prisoners of war in England. But at the meeting of the association after the outbreak of war these same scientific men received honorary degrees from a British university with special applause.
When public opinion in regard to war is so subject to emotional control, the way of wisdom is to avoid war and the conditions leading to war, even to the extent of holding that there never is a good war or a bad peace. The only gleam of hope in the present situation is that public sentiment in this country is against war and against the nations which, rightly or wrongly, are supposed to be the aggressors, and that each nation is anxious to disclaim responsibility for the existing chaos. In its inception the war was an affair of militarists and diplomatists, and Germany was unfortunate in combining these two classes in the same clique. All would have been different if there had been a Bismarck to whom the military machine was subordinated; there might have been war between Russia and Germany, but there would have been no European war. Conditions were better in Great Britain, and diplomacy tried to prevent war, but when war came then diplomacy had involved the people in its tricks.
Suddenly out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves,
Like lightning it lep't forth half startled at itself,
Its feet upon the ashes and the rags, its hands tight to the throats of kings.
But none of us can see clearly in the storm and in the darkness. It is our helplessness, the horror of it all, the pity of it all, that overwhelm us. The only safe conclusion is that the work of the world for science and for civilization must be maintained. We may well honor the Paris Academy of Sciences for continuing its meetings when the enemy were at the gates of Paris and the government had fled; the scientific men and scholars of Strassburg for opening the sessions of the university at the usual time. And most of all it is our business to carry forward the flickering torch. The fact that the greatest nations of Europe will be prevented, not only this year but for some years to come, from doing their share of scientific work, makes it all the more necessary that the scientific men, the scientific institutions and the scientific journals of this country should maintain and increase their efforts.
CRYSTALS AND X-RAYS
As part of the celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Brown University a series of meetings and courses of lectures have been arranged. One of the most interesting of these was a series of four lectures by Professor William Henry Bragg, F.R.S., of the University of Leeds, discussing the important work that has recently been done on the phenomena resulting from the passage of X-rays through crystals.
Two years ago an experiment of great beauty and extreme scientific importance was successfully carried out in the physical laboratories at Munich by Friedrich and Knipping, acting on a brilliant suggestion made by Laue, a member of the staff of the university at Zurich. To put it very briefly the experiment consisted in the exposition of the interference effects accompanying the passage of X-rays through crystals, and it proved that X-rays consist of extremely short waves in the ether. It is now clear that X-rays are exactly the same thing as light rays, except that the wave length is roughly ten thousand times smaller. The significance of this discovery can not be compressed into a single sentence because it points in several independent directions.
In the first place, the result is of the greatest importance in connection with the general theories of radiation. The undulatory theory of light has been extraordinarily successful in correlating experimental facts. Towards the end of the last century it seemed as if it had conquered all the great problems of physical optics. More recently it has
