Abstract
PROF. J. W. MACKAIL, in his presidential address to the British Academy delivered in July last (Oxford University Press, pp. 11. Is. net), laid it down as a principle that “the products of the Academy as an organised body… are all, in their different ways, and from their different angles and lines of approach, means towards an end”, which he went on to define further as including two interlinked motives: to maintain a standard of learning and to preserve the continuity of civilisation. This view of the functions of the Academy would lay a heavy burden of responsibility on any body, however august; but if the further dictum be accepted that it is by the first that the second may be most directly and most effectively attained, it adds an impressive weight to the opinion the president expressed at an earlier stage in his address, that the Academy's grant from the Treasury of £2,000, only recently restored to its full amount, is quite inadequate. In the field of pure scholarship, certain enterprises, it is true, have been able to make progress through the Academy's subsidy. Yet even here, in what might be regarded as the Academy's special province, in number they make a poor showing. In the vast and wider fields of humanistic studies the prospect is even less encouraging. In archaeological research, now that the excavations at Samaria have been brought to an end, apart from the contribution to the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, which stands in a special category, the only body to which the Academy contributes is the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. Archaeological research unfortunately falls between the two stools of science and letters, belonging to the one by its technique, to the other in the applications of its results. This contention apart, in comparison with Continental academies, the British Academy is second to none in the standing of its fellowship; but its material contribution, as a body, to the advancement of the subjects which have been brought within its purview is negligible.
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Research and the British Academy. Nature 136, 1022 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/1361022a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1361022a0