50 Years Ago

In his presidential address to the Library Association … Dr. J. Bronowski said that a civilized society must preserve what its best minds discover, but preservation alone does not make it an educated or even a cultured society. Moreover, an educated society could exist only when knowledge is not merely stored but is also shared, and it was the invention of printing that made the book an instrument of education … but in science the public libraries have scarcely played that part at all: if they are to do so, they must have the books to enable them to make the language of science familiar to those who are not professional scientists … He did not think that the printed book was the last instrument of education we would discover, but he was sure that the printed book and the public library would remain the most powerful means of self-education.

From Nature 26 October 1957.

100 Years Ago

In India at the present moment the ravages of plague, though not so great as those of the Black Death or of the Great Plague in London, are nevertheless dreadful. During the first six months of this year no less than 1,060,000 deaths from plague occurred in India, and out of these 632,000 occurred in the Punjaub, which has a population of only twenty-five millions, that is to say, one in every forty inhabitants in this district has died of plague between January and June … The great difficulties in the way of preventative measures are ignorance and apathy, to which superstition is often superadded. In some parts of India there is great prejudice against taking life of any kind … Cases of plague from time to time arrive at the port of London … We are pursuing a foolish policy in allowing rat- and flea-infected districts to exist in the East End of London and other similar places.

From Nature 24 October 1907.