50 YEARS AGO

In the leading article in Nature of August 20 on “Educational Problems of the Colonial Territories”, it is stated that “only some 450 scientists are at present engaged in Colonial research”... Most British scientific workers are superannuated at the age of approximately sixty-five. Many of them are capable of another ten years of research, and a moderate amount of teaching. Some, at least, would be happy to work in a Colonial university or research institute. The necessary qualifications are the capacities to work in a tropical or subtropical climate, and to form friendships with non-Europeans... I think that the presence in a Colonial university of even two or three Fellows of the Royal Society carrying out fundamental research with African or Asian colleagues would help the local population to generate its own scientific culture.

J. B. S. Haldane

From Nature 15 October 1955.

100 YEARS AGO

The Citizen, a Study of the Individual and the Government — Prof. Shaler, who is professor of geology at Harvard, has set before himself the practical and unambitious task of instructing the youth of the United States in the first principles of citizenship. In this he has succeeded; his work is interesting, suggestive and extremely sensible... A favourable specimen of his mode of argument may be found in the discussion of woman's suffrage. There is no reference to the various views held by thinkers from Plato downwards; but probably Prof. Shaler's one-page argument is quite sufficient, that women, owing to their usually secluded lives, are not fitted in the same way as men to form judgments on political questions, but that, after all, if a majority of women should desire to vote, it would probably be best to give them the franchise, for the reason that it is most undesirable to have any considerable body of the people in a discontented state.

From Nature 12 October 1905.