Science and Civilisation 1

Abstract

THE San Francisco meeting has been appointed with the double purpose of encouraging the development of science in the Pacific region and of uniting with other organisations in celebrating the completion of the Panama Canal. There could scarcely be a better illustration of the relations of science to civilisation than the canal supplies. This great waterway has been constructed, not so much by the potency of our national wealth in gold, not so much by the wonderful engineering and administrative ability which we all delight to honour, as by the victory of pure arid applied science over the sources of malarial arid yellow fever infection. Three centuries of research in the various branches of biology, as pure sciences, inaugurated by Vesalius's anatomical dissections (about 1530), by Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood (about 1616), by Hooker's introduction of the micrdScope (about 1665), by Leeuwenhoek's discovery of protozoa (1675), and indeed of bacteria (1687), and continued by a succession of unselfish men whose names are as household words to all biologists, had led up naturally to the mighty contributions of Pasteur, Lister, and Koch in bacteriology. Then followed, logically, the investigations of Reed and others upon yellow fever infection, and of Laveran, Manson, and Ross upon malarial infection. Except for such voluntary tests as were made at the peril of their lives by Drs. Lazear and Carroll in Cuba in the year 1900, in which Lazear paid the extreme penalty of death from yellow fever, and for the tests made by many other volunteers, especially in Italy, as to malaria, in order to determine the precise conditions under which certain mosquitoes transmit these diseases, the canal would not be complete to-day. Our Government might not, in fact, have started upon its construction; or, if the Government had started blindly to lead the blind, there would have been failure as miserable as that recorded by the French canal company, and for the same reason. We forget unpleasant facts quickly; for example: that of thirty-six brave French nurses who came together to the canal zone, only twelve returned to France; that out of eighteen ambitious young French engineers who crossed the Atlantic on the same ship for service on the canal, only one was alive at the end of thirty days; and that the labourers died by the thousands. The project of constructing the canal was surrendered to an unknown enemy. Let us assume, however, that such sacrifices had prevailed in their purpose, and that the canal had been completed in accordance with the engineering plans. With malaria and yellow fever still ruling in the canal zone, and with the zone as a centre of infection for all ports of the Atlantic and the Pacific, would a completed canal be a valued asset to commerce, or would it be a constant menaces and a nuisance? Let Memphis and Havana and New Orleans answer. A grateful people could worthily erect by the Golden Gate a monument to Lazear, who gave all that he had to make the construction of the canal possible, and to make the completed canal of permanent value.