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New Zealand Centennial SurveysXII. New Zealanders and Science
New Zealanders and SciencebyS. H. JenkinsonWellingtonDepartment of Internal AffairsNew Zealand1940
Preface
Theshort span of New Zealand's national life is roughly coterminous with the life period of modern science. The colony came into being in a period of scientific ferment; and, by a happy chance, the Treaty of Waitangi was drawn up in a setting already made historic by the visit of the young Charles Darwin. So through a century the progress of New Zealand has kept pace with the progress of science. Among the first colonists were men fired by the discoveries of their time, and they and their successors found in the resources of this country a superlatively interesting field for the application of the training and knowledge they had acquired in the old world. Then, as the colony developed and its own scientific tradition was established, in its turn New Zealand sent out scientists of whom one at least was to achieve the highest eminence.
Indeed in a very wide sense New Zealand owes its present character and position to the application and development of those scientific ideas which were current in the first half of the nineteenth century: its commerce, both internal and external, flows along channels formed by scientific invention and research; its principal export trade has been made possible by the work of scientists; the fertility of its soil has been renewed only by the aid of laboratories and research institutes. This, however, the more directly 'mechanic side of science', is not the subject of this survey. Vitally important as they are to the well-being of New Zealand, I am not concerned here with the Wheat Research Institute, the laboratories of agricultural colleges and of government departments—to name only a few of New Zealand's centres of applied science. Rather it has been my aim to present an account of 'theoretic' science in New Zealand (the definition of these terms I shall postpone to my first chapter) and of some amongst the men who have added to its achievements during the Dominion's short history.
This publication, I should further explain, is not a scientific brochure, it is certainly not written by a scientist, and it is primarily intended for the non-scientific reader. For these reasons I have made sparing use of technical terms and have introduced material which might be considered extraneous in a work of more rigidly scientific pretensions.
My thanks are due in preparing this survey to many helpers, but particularly to the friends connected with theRailways Magazine.I have helped myself liberally from that monthly which proved a veritable mine of information. Finally, I must not omit to mention the part taken by the Centennial publications staff in bringing this book into conformity with the other volumes of the series.
S. H. JenkinsonWellingtonDecember 1939
Contents
PagePrefacev1 Introduction12 The Forerunners93 The Pioneers174 Von Haast365 Hector486 Hutton607 The Establishment of a Scientific University708 The Early Professors809 Rutherford9310 Mellor10411 Cockayne11712 Gifford12513 Cotton13714 Conclusion146A Note on Sources153Index161
Illustrations
Lord RutherfordFrontispiece
From the oil painting by Oswald Birley, reproduced here by permission of the Management Committee of the National Art Gallery, Wellington.
Sir Joseph Banksfacing page 10
This engraving was made by W. Dickinson from the portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and was first published in June 1774.
The Whitcombe Pass36
From an original painting by Sir Julius von Haast, now in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. Besides the Whitcombe pass, the sketch shows Louper Peak on the left, the Louper stream in the centre, and Mount Martius on the right. It is one of the best examples of von Haast's topographical drawings.
Ranunculus Insignis on Mount Hector36
From a photograph by H. Farmer McDonald.
F. W. Hutton60
From a photograph published in The New Zealand Journal of Science,January 1885.
Two Sketches By J. W. Mellorfacing Page 114
The figure on the left of the upper sketch, The Maori Salutation, is Mellor himself. The lower sketch, entitled The First Technical Association in Quest of Knowledge (Period1690), is explained by this caption: 'Messrs. Elers took extreme precautions to preserve their supposed secrets of manufacture . . . and they tried in every way to protect themselves against the inquisitiveness of neighbouring potters.—Rise and Progress of the Staffordshire Potteries.' Both these illustrations and the caption are taken from Mellor's Uncle Joe's Nonsense: A Medley of Fun and Philosophy (1934).
Leonard Cockayne120Cockayne is shown inspecting tussock (poa litorosa) on Ewing island, Auckland group. This photograph by S. Page is reproduced by permission of the Canterbury Branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
A. C. Gifford136
From a photograph by Miss Ruth Fletcher, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington.
A Land-Form Change From Cotton's Geomorphology of New Zealand144
This diagram is redrawn from a figure by the late Professor W. M. Davis.
This volume is one of a series commissioned and published by the Government of New Zealand. The Government however does not hold itself responsible for any statement made or opinions expressed herein. The responsibility for these is the author's and his alone.
New Zealanders and Science
1 Introduction
'The Value of man's life on earth is to be valued only by the standard of the spirit, to which the thing achieved is little and the quality of the mind that achieved it much, which cares less for the sum of knowledge attained than for the love of knowledge.' These brave words were written by Gilbert Murray in appraising the achievements of Greece; but the criterion is not less true if applied to more recent triumphs of the spirit of man in a locality less remote. The panegyric may have to be worded more humbly because the achievements are relatively recent and the men who achieved them relatively familiar; yet this chronicle of science in New Zealand is a story of the life-work of great men, men who were imbued with a true love of knowledge, men who set the task above the prize. It would be a matter of scorn for the chronicler and pity for the chronicled if, in an unpardonable mood of idle braggadocio, I were to attempt to raise up unprofitable deeds and futile actors to an eminence that could not be claimed for them as an incontestable right. But that danger is not present to unnerve me. The claims may be advanced in halting phrases, the records may have been carelessly gathered, and the evidence may be unskilfully handled; but the spirit of the men themselves and the quality of the work that uplifted them must surely emerge 'in a manner far above our poor power to add or to detract'.
I may now permit myself to make the statement I have been leading up to: In proportion to their numbers, New Zealanders have done more for the progress of modern science than any other people. To clinch this assertion it is necessary only to call to mind the eminent, if not in each case the pre-eminent, position held in world science by Rutherford in atomic physics, Mellor in inorganic chemistry, Cockayne in ecological botany, Gifford in stellar physics, and Cotton in geomorphology. When all these men were living, as they were early in 1934, it is doubtful if any other country could proclaim such a galaxy of living scientists. I will be accused of being bold, to the point of rashness, in making this assertion and the boast it implies. To the charge of boldness I must plead guilty. I know full well the daring involved but I also know full well wherein it lies: it lies in daring to leave off where I did. The names of Hector, Hutton, and von Haast in our initial phase of observational science, of Buck, Elsdon Best, Jenness, and Firth in recent anthropology, of the rising star Aitken in mathematics, and of Guthrie-Smith in 'Tutiraology' might also seem to demand inclusion. It is true that in a thousand years the names of but one or two may have endured the ravages of time. But of the heroes of Marathon the name of only one comes easily to the mind.
In a book devoted to scientists and their work it would seem desirable that a definition of what is meant by the word 'science' should be given as early as possible. Unfortunately this is, on the authority of that very eminent scientist and great historian of science, Professor Charles Singer, 'a question that cannot be answered easily, nor perhaps exactly answered at all. None of the definitions seem to cover the field exactly; they are either too wide or too narrow.' Any such dictum as that 'science is classified or systematised knowledge' is, of course, only begging the question. The Greeks with their clarity of mind and lucidity of language would have prevented the difficulty by having different words for the 'mechanic' and 'theoretic' sides of science; indeed they did this for their own particular science, mathematics, using one word for the 'calculator' and another for the scientist of the theory of numbers. They were the only people who have done so.
The gathering of facts by direct observation is a preliminary but essential part in the development of each science. The Arabs knew the facts relating to the velocity of falling bodies, but it remained for Newton to generalise the law of gravitation and for Einstein to attempt to universalise it. The Egyptians knew the distance of the sun from the earth probably as accurately as we know it,
The dubiety arises because an essential factor in the calculation consists in measuring a distance on the earth for a base line. Once this is determined it is very easy to calculate the enormous distance that divides the earth from the sun. But it is very difficult to measure exactly the relatively short base on the earth. We know the base taken by the Egyptians, but we are unable to determine whether their measurement was more exact than ours, although the discrepancy does not exceed more than 500 miles; this is well within the limits of tolerance usually stipulated in the British Standard of Specifications.
but it was left for Gifford to consider what bearing the figure has on the origin of the planets. A better example still is furnished by the work of Aristotle. Many of his years of scientific labour had to be used in first-hand observation, gathering that amazing collection of facts in natural history which still surpasses that of any scientist who has ever worked in the same field. While doing this work he was engaged only on the 'mechanic side of science', and although he made great use of his collected facts, it was still left for Darwin to generalise the theory of evolution and write the Origin of Species. But, alike while merely gathering facts by mechanic observation or while working to build up a rational theory of life based on these observations, Aristotle was all the time a great scientist. Roger Bacon wrote of him that 'although Aristotle did not arrive at the end of knowledge, he set in order all parts of philosophy'; and Singer also tells us that Darwin himself wrote to that other great naturalist, Ogle, in 1882: 'From quotations I had seen I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion of what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, although in very different ways; but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.'
I feel that these disjointed illustrations are clarifying the problem and a chance remark of T. L. Heath seems to solve it completely. Writing in Greek Mathematics and Astronomy, he says: 'the Greek with his determination to see things as they are and to see them whole, his burning desire to be able to give a rational explanation of everything in heaven and earth, was irresistibly driven to natural science, mathematics and exact reasoning in general.' I think we have it now. Science is the knowledge gathered by minds not only determined to see things as they are and to see them whole but also filled with a burning desire to be able to give a rational explanation of everything.
Alas, I have been driven to attempt the definition of the undefinable, but this definition is exactly what I want for my purpose. It does not exclude from the ranks of scientists those who engage themselves chiefly on the mechanic side of science, so long as they are working to furnish a rational explanation of something. It explains, however, why every amateur botanist who gathers wild flowers on the hills is not a scientist, even if, as Linnaeus did, he falls on his knees to thank God for the sight of a field of English gorse in bloom; why every tireless astronomer who directs his home-made telescope on the snowy poles of Mars is not a scientist, peer he ever so reverently; why every elderly gentleman who wounds the atmosphere with a whitebait net is not a scientist, even if he does exhibit so noble a scorn for appearances; why every geologist or chemist 'on location' with the oil-drill or the dredge is not a scientist, even if it is the largest drill or dredge in the world. Finally, it explains why this book is not to become a mere Who's Who of Science in New Zealand.
Another difficulty remains; that is to define the term 'New Zealander' for the purpose of this survey. Here I fear recourse to the Greeks will not help me, for the same difficulty exists in defining the word 'Greek'. That difficulty has been surmounted for all practical purposes by defining a Greek as any person who lived not less than 1,800 or more than 2,500 years ago and wrought every type of thoughtful work with surpassing excellence and in the Greek spirit. Let us hope some such definition will also be applicable to New Zealanders in 2,000 years. Obviously it will not do to claim New Zealand association for Charles Singer, the scientist, because his brother is a leading barrister in Auckland; or for Dr Schmidt, a German visitor, who was granted the munificent sum of £100 in 1855 by the Otago provincial council to explore the whole province and discover a practicable route to the West Coast, but whose expedition ended in failure and in his lonely death in the Catlins bush. (Incidentally Dr Schmidt had at least leanings to science, since he proposed on his journey to test his theory that New Zealand had once been connected with South America.) The difficulty of deciding what constitutes a New Zealander remains and will be dealt with arbitrarily if the occasion arises.
One word more and this introductory chapter will end. The list of names I have already quoted is more than warrant for what should, nay must, be an illustrious chronicle. But behind these names there also stands a host of virtually unknown workers that is surely unsurpassed in any other country. The war is waged and the victories are won equally by the privates in the ranks and the leader in the saddle. So it is with the fights of science. The leaders are proudly acclaimed, and none would have it otherwise; but in the background are many obscure men on whose efforts the success of the leaders depends. I am not referring to young men eagerly worrying out a thesis for a scientific degree, or those working under some noted leader of science in the half-hope that the infection will be 'catching'. I am referring to an army of humble and frequently unlettered men who devote, and have devoted, their little leisure and scanty means to exploration, more particularly into the natural history of the Dominion, with vague hopes that in some way their records, experiences, or discoveries may be of use to the leaders in the branch of science in which they are interested. It was to one section only of this army of patient observers that Dr Cockayne expressed his gratitude in these eloquent words— though the praise applied to all: 'For the plant historians here, and the plant questioners, have been but few in number; nor at any time have they been properly equipped for their work, either with books, instruments, or the all-important money. But as will be seen, they were furnished with what is better than all—love for their self-appointed task and true enthusiasm, armed with which success is certain.'
2 The Forerunners
In the pre-settlement and early settlement days New Zealand formed a happy hunting-ground for many eminent men of science attracted here from distant centres of civilisation. By nature the country was fitted to make valuable scientific contributions, particularly in the spheres of geology and botany, and long before colonisation began, visiting scientists were impressed by the rich field of research that lay open to them. The earliest of these visiting scientists was Sir Joseph Banks who, with a party comprising Dr Daniel Carl Solander and several assistants, accompanied Captain Cook on his first voyage. Banks considered that New Zealand plant life lacked variety, but he was not without compensations: 'The entire novelty, however, of the greater part of what we found recompensed us as natural historians for the want of variety.' Of the many species noted by Banks and Solander, only a dozen, a few of which were common to many parts of the world, had been described by any botanist. 'We botanised with our usual good success, which could not be doubted in a country so totally new' is a typical entry in Banks's journal.
The results of the expedition were all that could be expected from scientific knowledge and enthusiasm released in a field so novel. The party collected 360 species of plants and ferns, and Solander wrote descriptions of more than 300 of them, while, on his return, Banks had numerous folio copper engravings prepared. As Cockayne lamented, these remained for over a century in the archives of the British Museum, until at length their publication was undertaken in 1900. Banks made preparations to accompany Cook on the second voyage, but owing to a difference with the sailors over the accommodation for the scientists and their equipment, he had reluctantly to cancel his plans. Dr J. R. Forster, a German naturalist, and his son were appointed instead and made the trip, but with less successful results. The scholarly surgeon of the third voyage, Dr Anderson, completes the list of scientists who visited New Zealand under the command of the greatest of English navigators.
Cook's achievements opened the way for an increasing number of expeditions—British, French, and American. Captain Vancouver, who had sailed on the second voyage as a midshipman in the Resolution, arrived in 1791 bringing with him Dr Archibald Menzies as collector. Menzies was an able worker, and some of his results were to have the distinction of illustrating Sir W. J. Hooker's Musci Exotici and Icones Filicum. Comparable with Cook's in their scope and thoroughness were the two expeditions under the command of Dumont d'Urville, the first in 1827, the second during the year when New Zealand was finally recognised as a British possession. Before that, however, in the period when New Zealand was vaguely thought of as a dependency of New South Wales, the official botanist of that colony, Allan Cunningham, had paid two visits. In 1826 he spent four months at the Bay of Islands and he came again in 1838. His premature death as the result of a chill caught on the second visit makes him the first martyr to science in this country. The flora of New Zealand must have had unusual attractions for the Cunningham family, since Allan's brother, Richard, deserted from the navy in 1833 to undertake a similar botanical excursion.
Two distinguished names remain to be added to the list of visitors during this period, and both are linked with the scene and the personalities of the Treaty of Waitangi. Charles Darwin arrived at the Bay of Islands on 21 December 1835 as naturalist on the Beagle expedition commanded by New Zealand's future governor, Captain Robert FitzRoy. During their ten days in the Bay Darwin met James Busby, who accompanied him on several walks and provided him with Maori guides. 'Mr Bushby', as Darwin called him, informed the naturalist 'that a little quiet irony would frequently silence any one of these natives in their most blustering moments.' The naturalist also met the 'missionary gentlemen', Messrs Williams, Davis, Clarke, and Baker. Darwin was delighted at the Williams's establishment at Waimate, which brought England vividly before his mind, and inspired high hopes for the future progress of this fine island. The United States Exploring Expedition, commanded by Charles Wilkes, with J. D. Dana as geologist, reached the Bay of Islands at the time of Hobson's arrival. Dana's stay was short and his observations cursory and limited, but they—and the critical account of the signing of the Treaty—make the records of the expedition of permanent interest to New Zealanders.
Even earlier than the establishment of British sovereignty began the systematic colonisation of New Zealand which was to add enormously to the scientific knowledge of the country. This phase of scientific investigation opened most auspiciously with the work of Dr Ernst Dieffenbach whom the directors of the New Zealand Company had selected as surgeon and naturalist of the Tory expedition. This German scientist had a wide acquaintance with many branches of science including botany, geology, and anthropology. He was moreover a man of broad sympathies who grasped the essential problems of the contact between European colonisers and an intelligent native race. His Travels in New Zealand gives an extraordinarily interesting and informative account of the wanderings of a man of science in a country where the influences of European settlement and culture were beginning to penetrate.
On his arrival in New Zealand in August 1839 he first studied the principal geological features of the Marlborough sounds district together with its flora and fauna. While the Tory was at Port Nicholson, Dieffenbach went on a sixteen-day excursion up the Hutt valley, partly to carry out geological observations, partly to ascertain whether Port Nicholson had ready access to fertile country. From then until 1841 he undertook most extensive and arduous journeys to which we owe the first systematic information about the geology of the North Island. With the whaler, Heberley, he made the first ascent by Europeans of Mount Egmont after being forced by the weather to abandon an earlier attempt. Dieffenbach calculated the height of the mountain as 8,839 feet, an extremely accurate measurement under the circumstances. (The height of Egmont is now estimated at 8,260 feet.)
After a journey to the Chatham islands in the Cuba, the scientist returned to New Zealand, landing at the Bay of Islands in October 1840. Accompanied by Captain Bernard, 'an adventurous Frenchman', he undertook a geological excursion to North Auckland, where he noted and lamented the tendency of colonists to burn forests indiscriminately. From North Cape he moved downwards via Hokianga, Kaitaia, Whangaroa, Kaipara, and the Thames, to Auckland.
Dieffenbach then conducted the first examination by a European scientist of the thermal regions. He came south to the Waikato river and then down the Waipa valley to Lake Taupo. To such extremes did his scientific zeal lead him that he tasted the waters of the various hot springs and geysers which he encountered. His description of the thermal activity round Lake Taupo is extremely thorough and scientifically accurate. It is also of interest to the general reader, for Dieffenbach could describe with amusing eloquence such uncomfortable experiences as crossing the lake in bad weather in a small Maori canoe. With no little courage he followed native guides into places where only a treacherous crust of earth one foot in depth separated him from a morass of boiling mud.
From Taupo Dieffenbach followed the thermal lake system through the centre of the North Island, travelling via Lakes Roto Aira, Rotomahana, Rotorua, and their subsidiary lakes. He was bitterly disappointed that the tapu on Mount Tongariro prevented him from examining the crater of an active volcano, but he was not prepared to pay the four sovereigns conscience money which the Maoris demanded to allow him to break the tapu. Lake Rotomahana, which he believed to have been seen by only one European, Mr Chapman, was described as the most beautiful scene he had ever beheld. His was the earliest published description of the Pink and White Terraces and of the native pa on the shores of Lake Tarawera, so tragically destroyed in 1886. After tracing the line of thermal activity out to White Island, Dieffenbach returned to Auckland.
The second volume of Travels in New Zealand consists of a section on the Maori race, a grammar and dictionary of the Maori language, written by Dieffenbach, and a section on New Zealand fauna written by Dr Gray of the British Museum. In his study of the Maori people, Dieffenbach shows qualities worthy of the finest type of scientific mind. As an anthropologist he studied Maori physiognomy, noting the fine development of the skull. His observations led him to state that the Polynesians were more akin to the Phoenicians, Syrians, and Carthaginians of Asia than to the Malayans and Javans. As a medical man he studied the diseases common to the natives — skin irritations due to the adoption of the blanket as an article of clothing, and lung troubles due to the dampness of native dwellings. Foreseeing the evil consequences of driving the natives from their land, he hoped that the New Zealand colonists would spare Maori civilisation, so that the native would be left to work happy and respected among his own people, with an allotment of arable land sufficient to support him. It is unfortunate that a man of such ability and integrity did not remain longer in the colony, but after two adventurous years here, he left in October 1841 for England.
If the Company did not again employ a scientist of Dieffenbach's varied attainments, it maintained a desultory patronage of science and, towards the close of its existence, shared in the expenses of the famous Acheron survey expedition (1848-51) which brought with it Dr Charles Forbes as geologist and David Lyall as surgeon. As the ship moved along the coast, both men assiduously explored and collected, Lyall's name being immortalised in Ranunculus lyallii, 'the largest buttercup in the world'. Finally, reference must be made to the French expedition to Akaroa in 1840. With it came an enthusiastic botanist, Raoul, medical officer on the frigate Aube. For three years he studied plant life at Banks Peninsula and the Bay of Islands, finally returning to France in the sloop Allier. His works, Choix de Plantes de la Nouvelle-Zélande (1846) and Fleurs Sauvages et Bois Précieux de la Nouvelle-Zélande (1889), were later published to form an extremely valuable contribution to New Zealand botany.
These scientists, French, American, and British, showed by the results of their excursions that New Zealand was indeed a land of promise for men of their profession. By their numerous writings and some excellently-produced maps, charts, and engravings, they attracted attention to a New Zealand in which, after British colonisation, the field lay open to the men of the next phase—the explorer scientists.
3 The Pioneers
As white settlers began to arrive in considerable numbers, the period of sporadic investigation drew to its close. The country was explored more systematically, and scientific work was no longer confined to the enthusiastic but brief researches of the visitor. Men now devoted their lives to the scientific exploration of New Zealand. Hence the period from the late fifties to 1880 may well be termed the era of the explorer scientist. In these years small parties of men went out into the wilderness, firstly to explore and chart an unknown country, secondly to serve the interests of science by studying geological and botanical features so far as time (largely a matter of provisions) would permit. A true judgment of the work of these pioneers can be formed only if we recollect the position of science in general in their time and, not less important, the conditions under which they worked.
What, then, was the position of science in the early years of Victoria's reign? Observational science had been carried on more or less through the ages, but rational science remained very much where the Greeks left it after the extraordinary flowering that occurred in the lower end of the Attic peninsula round about 300 b.c. mathematics, of course, progressed steadily through the centuries, and scientific geology was developed and had its 'heroic age' from 1790 to 1820; but it was only after the publication of the Origin of Species that the other natural sciences had any triumphs to compare with 'the glory that was Greece'. Chemistry had only a charlatan existence till Robert Boyle placed chemical analysis on a sound footing about 1650; but it was not till the nineteenth century that tables of atomic weights first led men to suspect that all was not stable with even the known elements. Thus began the ferment of thought that led to the discoveries of Rutherford, Soddy, and Bohr.
Botany and biology stood where Aristotle had left them until Linnaeus (1707-78) and Cuvier (1769-1832) laid the foundations for a new edifice. It was not till 1859, however, that the Origin of Species caused the men of the scientific world to stand for a moment awed and breathless, as if from 'a peak in Darien' they glimpsed a new ocean of thought.
Heat and light had received very inadequate treatment until the nineteenth century. In 1824 Carnot developed one of the most amazing and beautiful pieces of synthetic reasoning the world has ever seen, and proved that even in a perfect engine heat could not be converted into work without a serious loss of energy. The interdependence of heat and work was not enunciated by Joule till 1843, and it was not until 1865 that Maxwell defined heat as a mode of motion, and light as an electro-magnetic vibration. Even to-day the problems of heat and light are imperfectly understood and are the subjects of intensive research.
In the sixteenth century Copernicus re-discovered the facts about the earth's motion round the sun, known perfectly well to Aristarchus or his school 2,000 years before. Later Kepler, Newton, and Laplace invoked the powerful aid of mathematics to plot the motion of the spheres with meticulous exactitude. It was the invention of the spectroscope and the publication of Bickerton's theory in the latter half of the nineteenth century, which made possible the modern attacks on the theories of the genesis of the stars, attacks which have resulted in the new and rational science of astronomy or stellar physics, of which Gifford is an outstanding exponent.
Such was the scientific world with which New Zealand made contact when men of science arrived to stay not for a few months, but for years, and in some cases for a lifetime. The life and growth of New Zealand is thus seen to be contemporaneous with the life and growth of modern science. This explains why much of the work of the early provincial scientists appears mechanical to the wisdom of to-day, wisdom that will no doubt be the folly of to-morrow.
To the men who undertook the systematic scientific work in an unknown wilderness all honour is due. The forests were tangled and trackless, the rivers unbridged and treacherous, the mountains rugged and precipitous, and all these took their toll of the early observers and natural historians who laboured during the first thirty or forty years of New Zealand's colonisation. No danger or hardship was allowed to daunt them. Consider that tragic expedition of Haast and Dr Andrew Sinclair, the veteran botanist, in 1861, to explore the Rangitata and Ashburton rivers to their sources in 'mountain gloom and glory'. Dr Sinclair was drowned while crossing the main stream of the Rangitata a few days after leaving the Mesopotamia homestead, where Samuel Butler, of Erewhon and Note Books fame, had established himself. Haast writes of the tragedy eloquently and sincerely: 'We brought the body of my lamented friend to Mesopotamia and buried him on March 29th. Near the banks of the river, just where it emerges from the Alps, with their perpetual snowfields glistening in the sun, amidst Veronicas and Senecios and covered with Celmisias and Gentians, there lies his lonely grave. With almost juvenile alacrity he had climbed and searched the mountain sides, showing that, notwithstanding his advanced age, his love for his cherished science had supplied him with strength for his pursuits, until at last, overrating his powers, and not sufficiently aware of the treacherous nature of alpine torrents, he fell a victim to his zeal. Great and deep was my sorrow, and with a saddened heart I had to continue alone the work upon which we had set out together.' To turn back did not occur to the heroes of science in those early days; only, with so much to do and so little done, 'with a saddened heart I had to continue alone the work upon which we had set out together.'
Often an expedition entailed long and arduous travel through an unknown country. For months at a time scientists disappeared from the haunts of men, tramping and climbing among jungle-choked cliffs above the snow-fed torrents, camping among boulders with the thunder and roar of the swollen river always in their ears, till at last, perchance, they reached their goal on the western ocean beach and 'stood in the surf, giving three hearty cheers', or reached the far-out homestead in the lonely valley in rags, shoeless, and without provisions. Safely home again, they prepared, with no clerical assistance, voluminous reports, in longhand, to the superintendent of their province (if they happened to be in the service) merely prefacing them with some such words as these (I quote an actual record): 'Sir—I have the honour to forward herewith my report on the Geology of Otago, with maps and sections. I have to tender my thanks to W. M. Hodgkins, Esq., for the two spirited sketches of Milford Sound and Mount Aspiring; and also to J. McKerrow, Esq., for the valuable table of altitudes attached to the report.—I have the honour to be, Your obedient servant, F. W. Hutton. Provincial Geologist'. This report was the result of about fifteen months' exploration, principally alone and on horseback, although the government steamer Luna provided transport to Stewart Island and several of the West Coast sounds. It had the fortune to be printed, but while the sketches of Hodgkins are undoubtedly spirited, the author sadly observes: 'It cannot be supposed that in such a rapid survey as I have made of the Province, I could, single-handed, have filled in quite accurately all the boundaries of the different formations; but I feel tolerably confident in the general accuracy of the work, and hope that it will be found a safe foundation for future detailed surveys.'
The report as printed covered 151 pages of octavo size and showed that Hutton personally examined virtually every square mile of the 20,876 square miles in his area (Southland and Stewart Island were then included in Otago), but it pains me to learn, on the authority of James Park, that certain rocks were ascribed by Hutton to the Laurentian series, whereas 'the association of the Maniototoan with the graptolite-bearing formation is so close that there is no reason to suppose that its age is older than Cambrian'!
The scientists in the provincial services were not alone; a band of amateur searchers was always in evidence. These men, too, braved the rigour of the hills and the hardships of the wilds with devoted zeal for their 'self-appointed task'. As Wentworth Thompson puts it: 'Deep down in the love of nature, whether it be of the sensual or intellectual kind, and in the art of observation which is its outcome and first expression, he the roots of all our Natural Science. All the world over these are the heritage of all men, though the inheritance be richer or poorer here and there: they are shown forth in the lore and wisdom of hunter and fisherman, of shepherd and husbandman, of artist and poet.' Surely we can claim that the heritage was as rich here as elsewhere! The material finds of these men provided the nucleus of collections in our provincial museums, and their records formed a share of the transactions of the philosophical societies that flourished in each centre.
Possibly much of the work of these men was done on the 'mechanic side of science', but this was inevitable in the circumstances, and the great majority of the workers were animated by the true scientific spirit to find a rational explanation for all things. As for 'mechanic' work, this was absolutely necessary in a new country where fresh facts in natural history were waiting for discovery and were discovered in such profusion that time for examination and classification was difficult to find. During the feverish rush of discovery from 1860 to 1875, hundreds of botanical and palæontological specimens had to be shipped to England for detailed examination because the local scientists were too busy to deal with them. It must be remembered that the modern 'rational' side of science was developed for the sciences, other than mathematics and geology, only after 1860.
Of the personalities of these years, two visiting scientists, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker and Dr Ferdinand von Hochstetter, bridge the gap between the forerunners and the scientists who were New Zealanders either by birth or adoption. Joseph Dalton Hooker, son of the great botanist Sir William Hooker, visited New Zealand in 1841 when he was assistant surgeon and botanist to the Antarctic expedition of Sir James Ross. He arrived at the Bay of Islands on 16 August 1841 and remained there for three months. Under the guidance of William Colenso, Hooker made many excursions into the country, although the swampy nature of the district prevented him from making any extensive tours. He collected many specimens however, especially Cryptogams, before the expedition continued on a second journey to the Great Barrier. The expedition returned to England in September 1843 and early in the following year £1,000 was promised for the publication of the botany of the Antarctic voyage. Hooker decided to publish his work in three parts, the first on the antarctic portion, the second on the flora of New Zealand, and the third on the flora of Van Diemen's Land. The Flora Antarctica appeared in 1847, but it was not till 1853 after Hooker's famous exploration in the Kangchenjunga regions, that the publication of Flora Novae-Zelandiae was taken in hand. Out of his private purse he paid Colenso to make collections in all parts of New Zealand, and much of the latter's work appeared in the book. Hooker concluded that the appearance of the same species in lands separated by thousands of miles of ocean indicated the disappearance of considerable areas of land. His particular life work was the study of the geographical distribution of plants, an important factor in the substantiation of Darwin's theory, to which he was a very early convert. His own extensive travels and the care he took to keep in touch with botanical research in many parts of the world enabled Hooker to become a foremost authority on the geographical distribution of plants. He maintained his interest in New Zealand flora, and extensively revised his book on New Zealand. By arrangement with the government he published in 1864-7 his classical Handbook of the New Zealand Flora, a comprehensive botanical dictionary of New Zealand plants, with thorough descriptions of each species and notes on their distribution in other parts of the world. In this book he incorporated the earlier researches of Banks and Solander, Forster, the Cunninghams, d'Urville, Raoul, Dieffenbach, Lyall, and the later researches of Colenso, Haast, Lauder Lindsay, Hector, Buchanan, Sinclair, W.T.L. Travers, Monro, and others. It was one of the many excellent standard works written by Hooker in the period when the gradual acceptance of Darwin's theory was revolutionising the science of plant classification. Cockayne tells us: 'The great botanist died in 1911. He had seen almost the beginning of New Zealand botany. He himself had laid truly and well an enduring foundation; during more than seventy years he had watched the building rise, until at the time of his lamented death he saw it well advanced, and its labourers men either New Zealand-born or who for many years had made that land their home. To many of these men he was a friend, a guide, a counsellor. There is, indeed, no worker of real moment in the later botanical investigation of New Zealand but is deeply indebted to Hooker's influence and assistance, generously given.' The force of this tribute is seen not only in Cockayne's own work but notably in that of T. F. Cheeseman who, stimulated by Hooker's Handbook, conceived that interest in New Zealand flora which led to the publication in 1906 of the Manual, a monument alike to Cheeseman's patient research and to Hooker's guiding influence.
Hochstetter arrived at Auckland on 22 December 1858 as geologist on the Austrian warship Novara.Sir George Grey, then Governor of Cape Colony, had already informed the expedition of the wonders that New Zealand offered the scientist. On his arrival Hochstetter was immediately commissioned by the commander of the expedition to undertake a close examination of the coalfield near Auckland, which he did from 24 December until 2 January. As the geological nature of the country was so imperfectly known, the New Zealand Government hastened to take advantage of the presence of a first-class geologist, and applied to the commodore for the loan of Hochstetter to make geological surveys in the country, especially in the Auckland province. Hochstetter remained for nine months in New Zealand.
The government provided the scientist with a small house at Auckland to serve as a depot for his collections and as an infant museum. Hochstetter always endeavoured to collect several specimens of plants, rocks, and fossils, so that he could deposit duplicates there for the benefit of Auckland citizens. He found the neighbourhood of Auckland rich in interesting volcanic phenomena, and he noted sixty-one points of eruption in the immediate vicinity of the town. He made two short excursions before his main tour through the thermal regions. The first was south from Manukau harbour to the mouth of the Waikato river, when he discovered valuable fossils, and the second was north to the Waitakerei river and the Whangaparaoa peninsula. As no naturalist had visited the thermal country since Dieffenbach in 1840, a more comprehensive survey was needed and this Hochstetter undertook. With his newly acquired friend, Haast, he organised an expedition on an unusually grand scale for those days, the party boasting fifteen native porters. They left Auckland on 6 March 1859 and proceeded down to the Waikato, then up the Waipa river to Whaingaroa, Aotea, and Kawhia, where fossils were to be found. They proceeded as far south as Mokau and then turned inland across country to Lake Taupo. They sketched the lake, examined the hot springs on its shores, and then followed the remarkable line of boiling springs, solfataras, and fumaroles from where the Waikato leaves the lake out to White Island. In his account Hochstetter drew particular attention to the 'grandeur and peculiarity of the natural scenery' at Orakei Korako. He too saw the wonders of Lake Rotomahana, and even camped rather fearfully on a small hot island in the centre of the lake. 'Iceland excepted,' said Hochstetter, 'I consider this the most extensive hot-spring territory known.'
In May he reached the east coast near Maketu and proceeded along the coast to Tauranga, turned inland towards the Thames valley, and again struck the Waikato near Maungatautari. After visiting the Maori King Potatau Te Wherowhero at Ngaruawahia he returned to Auckland. During this period of three months the expedition collected 'a considerable store of geographical, botanical, and zoological material' and 'found ample opportunities for ethnographical studies.' Hochstetter made an excellent geological map of the country, a task for which he adopted, by means of the azimuth compass, a system of triangulation based on Captain Drury's nautical survey. Charles Heaphy, the artist, made valuable sketches, and the expedition took some fine photographs. A brief visit to the Cape Colville goldfield completed Hochstetter's work in Auckland.
At the request of the Nelson superintendent Hochstetter, accompanied by Haast, proceeded to Nelson, then New Zealand's leading mineral and metal district. The Nelson government did all it could to assist the scientists in their geological survey of the province, and placed the steamer Tasmanian Maid at their disposal so that they could examine points on the shores of Blind Bay and Golden Bay in rapid succession. Hochstetter examined the gold and coalfields in the vicinity of Nelson and traced a geological map of northern parts of the province. He was convinced of the richness of the goldfields at Aorere and Takaka, and he considered that they would be followed by the discovery of similar deposits in the mountain ranges of the South Island. He prophesied correctly, for the Aorere and Takaka districts gave a steady yield over a long period, although eclipsed by the wealth of the Otago and West Coast goldfields. Hochstetter again prophesied correctly the existence of workable coalfields in the Pakawau district, near Collingwood.
Hochstetter's expedition in Nelson was important not only for his study of minerals. He also increased his plant and fossil collections: 'The limestone caves of the Aorere Valley opened to us rich stores of Moa bones. Through the exertions of my companion Dr Haast not only single bones but more or less complete skeletons were brought to light. To these was added an almost complete skeleton of Palapteryx ingens
A type of moa.
. . .' From Lake Arthur (now called Rotoiti), the southernmost point reached by Hochstetter, he saw 'the stupendous peaks of the southern mountain-ranges with their summits of perpetual ice and snow glistening towards me'. In spite of his longing to visit these mountains he had to leave their exploration to his fellow geologist, Haast. After a farewell lecture in Nelson on the geology of the province, he left for Sydney on 2 October 1859.
In 1863 Hochstetter, now a professor at Vienna, published in German a book on his adventures in New Zealand. It was revised and published in English in 1867 under the title, New Zealand: Its Physical Geography, Geology and Natural History. The first part of the book is an interesting narrative of his journeys, the second part is devoted more exclusively to his scientific observations. He remarked on the peculiar geographical position of New Zealand. The system of mountains running from south-west to north-east formed a distinctly marked line of elevation in the Pacific Ocean. This longitudinal line was crossed almost at right angles by a line indicated by the direction of Foveaux Strait and Cook Strait, which was designated by Dana as the axis of the greatest depression in the Pacific Ocean. The principal eruptions, plutonic and volcanic, corresponded to the north-easterly line of elevation. Some of the ancient fossils which he found in the Richmond district led him to confirm Professor Agassiz's thesis that the older the formations, the more analogy is exhibited in their fossils, even in countries at a great distance from each other. Incorporating the researches of Dana, Haast, Hector, and Lauder Lindsay, he gave a list of the types of geological deposits and where they were to be found in New Zealand. He also provided summaries of the principal types of flora and fauna in New Zealand, and an unsympathetic chapter on the Maoris whom he regarded as a doomed race.
In nine brief months Hochstetter had laid the foundations of the geological history of the North Island and of those parts of the South Island outside Otago and Canterbury. New Zealand was indeed fortunate to secure the services of this eminent scientist even for so short a time, and it was fortunate too that Haast remained to devote a lifetime in this country to the work he had begun with his friend.
During this period, and indeed till the end of last century, the Rev. William Colenso was, as Hooker testified, the outstanding figure among New Zealand botanists. He arrived at the Bay of Islands as a missionary printer in 1834, and for sixty-five years was an ardent investigator in ethnology, botany, zoology, and the Maori language. Under other circumstances—and, indeed, if he had not spread his energies over a field so vast, even in his circumstances—he would have been a scientist of the very highest eminence. As it was, he became a figure of world-wide repute, acknowledged by his contemporaries as a very great man. For many years he collected botanical specimens to be incorporated, as already mentioned, in Sir J. D. Hooker's Handbook of the New Zealand Flora, and Hooker gratefully acknowledges the excellent services of this missionary botanist. Of his diverse scientific writings, which would form a fair-sized library in themselves, the greatest was his essay, On the Maori Races of New Zealand, written for the New Zealand Exhibition of 1865. This comprehensive review is equally praiseworthy for the tremendous amount of information gathered concerning Maori habits, customs, and modes of thought, for the extensive display of scientific knowledge of every description which illuminated it, and for the strong common sense and breadth of mind by which it was characterised. The fact that he was able to gain the confidence of the Maoris to such an extent that they, a secretive people, gave him full information concerning their customs, rites, and thoughts, and that having gathered this information he dealt with it so sympathetically and sensibly, shows that Colenso was a great man as well as a great scientist.
Other noteworthy scientists of the period were Crawford, Mantell, Buller, the elder Travers, the elder Kirk, William Skey, the analyst and chemist, and Alexander McKay, that venerable and romantic figure of geological history. To single out even these men for mention is an invidious task; but the array of scientific observers of the period and the range of the information they accumulated are well illustrated by the fact that such men must be dismissed with so cursory and ungracious a reference. When one considers the work of Sir Walter Buller on our native birds and realises that the other men I have named, and indeed a whole army of observers, devoted their lives to their self-appointed task just as wholeheartedly as he did, one is filled with admiration for their lives and attainments.
Because his work is less known to the public, and for no other reason, I must mention that in 1868 Skey, in a paper read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, first advanced the proposal to use cyanide in the amalgamation processes for the extraction of gold. The development of the process was largely, if not entirely, the work of William Skey and his successor, Dr Maclaurin. The tracing of their process would be a book that cannot be written here, but one that should be written to their honour and to the glory of New Zealand.
Overshadowing even these eminent scientists, however, were three great men — Haast, Hector, and Hutton — who were the leaders in New Zealand science until at least 1890. This is the order of their arrival and possibly also reflects the order of their scientific attainments. Each was appointed provincial geologist—Haast to Canterbury in 1860 and afterwards curator of the Canterbury Museum; Hector to Otago in 1861, where he remained until in 1865 he became director of the geological survey of New Zealand; Hutton to Otago in 1873. He left there in 1879 to become professor of biology at Canterbury College, and in 1893 he also became curator of the Canterbury Museum. But they were not only geologists; each was also a botanist and a zoologist of no mean order.
There are two 'miracles' associated with the growth of science in New Zealand. The first was the finding of these three outstanding scientists when the provincial and central governments recognised the necessity of instituting scientific exploration and survey. Consider the first geological survey of New Zealand. Sir James Hector was in command and associated with him were:
Sir Julius von Haast, k.c.m.g., ph.d. (Bonn), f.r.s.,f.g.s. (63 publications)
Professor F. W. Hutton, f.r.s., f.g.s. (105 publications)
E. H. Davis (2 publications)
Professor S. H. Cox, f.g.s. (58 publications)
Alexander McKay, f.g.s., field geologist (130 publications)
Professor J. Park, f.g.s., field geologist (113 publications)
William Skey, f.c.s., analyst
John Buchanan,f.l.s., botanist and draughtsman (3 publications).
The publications referred to are those listed in the very excellent geological bibliography appended to James Park's The Geology of New Zealand (1910). The list refers to books, pamphlets, and papers read before the philosophical societies and other scientific bodies, or incorporated in the geological survey publications, but includes only publications of geologic interest. Sir James Hector's name appears ninety-five times in the same list. In most cases their activities in botany and zoology were equally extensive.
The appointment of these three men, endowed alike with talent, character, robust manliness, and administrative ability was, then, the first of these 'miracles'. The second was the foundation of a scientific university and the selection of professors who were as eminent in their own spheres as the three explorer scientists. It is in terms of these men and their work that the history of the second phase in New Zealand science can best be unfolded.
4 Von Haast
Julius Haast was born on 1 May 1824 at Bonn, where his father was a burgomaster. He was educated at the grammar schools of Bonn and Cologne and afterwards studied geology and mineralogy at the University of Bonn, then the home of such brilliant geologists as Roemer, Goldfuss, Bischof, and vom Rath. After leaving the university he travelled extensively in Europe in order to widen his knowledge of field geology. The special study which he made of Etna and Vesuvius proved of great value in his later work in New Zealand. In 1858 he accepted the offer from an English shipping firm to come out to New Zealand and report on its suitability as a home for German emigrants.
Haast arrived at Auckland in the Evening Star on 21 December 1858, a day before the Austrian frigate Novara put into port with Dr Hochstetter on board. The journeys undertaken by Hochstetter and Haast in the Auckland and Nelson provinces have already been mentioned. The twenty-seven years of Haast's life which followed the departure of Hochstetter from the Nelson province late in 1859 may be taken as a continuation of the pioneering scientific work begun by him and Hochstetter together.
The Nelson provincial council, recognising the necessity for extending the researches so well begun, engaged Haast to conduct a geological examination of the country in order to ascertain what minerals of practical value were in or near the various ranges between Nelson and the Grey river, to look for suitable passes and routes, and to report on the feasibility of communication with the southernmost parts of the district, Westland being included in the Nelson province at that date. Finally Haast was to construct a rough topographical map that should serve as a basis for future operations. This arduous task, undertaken in January 1860, occupied eight months. The difficulties and dangers of the work can hardly be exaggerated. They were vividly described by Haast himself in his report to the Nelson provincial government, published in 1861. With packs weighing seventy pounds the small party had to fight its way up mountain sides, through dense bush entangled with supplejack and lawyers, over swamps, across deep rivers. At one stage their rations were reduced 'to a small pot of lillipe (or boiled flour) twice a day, with hoped-for additions of wekas or eels'. 'Our gun,' Haast continues, 'unfortunately was useless, having been entirely spoiled by the wet in frequently crossing rivers, without our having any means of protecting it from the water'.
The hardships were not suffered in vain, however. The seams of coal in the Grey valley, observed by Brunner, were found by Haast to be not of the brown coal already known in many parts of the province, but of a 'real coal, its compactness, lustre and combustibility, leaving no tiling to be desired.' Encouraged to make a more detailed study of the strata of the district, Haast discovered in the small valley of a tributary to the Buller several seams of fine black coal, one of which dipped so regularly as to suggest that the deposits would be of considerable value. He christened the valley by a name which has since become famous, 'Coalbrook Dale', now a centre of the Westport coal industry. In addition to the discovery of two coalfields, Haast found ample evidence of gold in the rivers. Haast's report concludes with a fairly comprehensive geological survey of the district covered, together with notes on botany and zoology.
Although the Nelson people appear not to have realised the value of Haast's work, he found in William Moorhouse, the superintendent of Canterbury, an appreciative patron. Towards the end of 1860 he received from Moorhouse a letter requesting him to make a geological examination of the mountain range separating Lyttelton from the Canterbury plains. A tunnel for the Lyttelton-Christchurch railway, a tremendous undertaking for a small settlement, had been projected. But the English contractors had met with some specially hard basaltic rocks at the Lyttelton end, and on Mount Pleasant had struck one of the hardest dykes in the system. Consequently they had thrown up the contract. Haast commenced a geological survey of Banks Peninsula on I December 1860 and on the 19th presented to the superintendent a report, together with thirty-four geological specimens. As a result, work on the tunnel was resumed.
Christchurch expressed its gratitude by offering Haast the post of provincial geologist to Canterbury, an office which he held with distinction from 1861-8. During these years he explored much of Canterbury and south Westland, charted the main topographical features, and studied the geological structure of these regions.
From February till June 1861 he explored the upper reaches of the Rangitata and Ashburton rivers. On this expedition he discovered three tributaries and glaciers and was rewarded further by finding some fossils of younger Palæozoic age. The expedition had its tragic aspect however, and the fate of Dr Sinclair, the botanist, reminds us of the perils ever attendant on the scientists of that period.
A second expedition in that year, on this occasion to the Malvern Hills and Mount Torlesse, produced some extremely interesting geological information quite apart from the discovery of a fine seam of coal in the valley of the Kowai. Mount Torlesse, the Thirteen Mile Bush, as well as the higher parts of the Malvern Hills, were found to be built up of the same type of sedimentary rocks as Haast had first seen in the country between the Waiau and Awatere rivers in Marlborough. The rocks had been so greatly changed in position by the flexure of the strata that in many cases the dip was nearly vertical, giving the high rocky ranges a ribboned appearance; in some spots they had actually been inverted, so that the lower beds appeared to be the upper ones. On the summits of these ranges a harvest of particularly interesting plants was reaped. On Mount Torlesse alone 200 flowering plants were collected, thirty of which were new to science.
Early in 1862 Haast and Arthur Dudley Dobson proceeded to the Mount Cook region to search for gold deposits, at the same time continuing the regular geological survey. The extensive river system which forms Lakes Tekapo, Pukaki, and Ohau was surveyed. Among the glaciers visited and named were the Godley, Tasman, Classen, Macaulay, Murchison, Faraday, Hooker, and Mueller. Numerous observations, sketches, and measurements were taken and Haast returned as usual laden with botanical and geological booty. A glance at a map will show the extent of country explored and surveyed in a few short months. It was on this occasion that Haast observed that the Mackenzie plains had formerly been the bed of an enormous glacier, and after the retreat of the ice had been filled with morainic accumulations and alluvial deposits.
On his return to Christchurch Haast was instrumental in the establishment of the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury. In his inaugural address, he not only reviewed the scientific research so far accomplished in New Zealand, touching on the Glacial Epoch and the possibility of a race of inhabitants prior to the Maori, but he also drew attention to scientific movements in the world at large, acclaiming the Origin of Species as the great work of the age in natural history.
The next six years were extremely strenuous. In 1863 he attempted successfully to reach the West Coast by Lake Wanaka and the headwaters of the Makarora, over what is now known as the Haast pass. The following year he returned to the Rangitata and Ashburton districts where he had previously discovered fossil remains. These two years of toil resulted in 6,000 geological, zoological, and botanical specimens either gained during his expeditions or acquired by exchanges with collectors in other countries. He spent many months classifying his collection in preparation for the founding of a museum. Then followed a journey to the Franz Josef glacier, so named by him, explorations at the headwaters of the Rakaia and Waimakariri rivers, and four visits from 1866-7 to the Waipara in order to secure saurian remains. When large quantities of moa bones were discovered in the swampy grounds at Glenmark, Haast was invited to conduct excavations there. No time was lost in accepting this invitation, and the geologist duly rejoiced as he conveyed a large American wagon load of dinornithic remains to Christchurch, where Mr Fuller, the taxidermist, built up the first seven complete moa skeletons. There was evidence that these ungainly birds had already been in existence in the Great Glacier period of New Zealand, and that they had continued to flourish till a very recent date.
The piercing of the Lyttelton tunnel provided such a wonderful opportunity to view the strata from the interior of an old volcanic peak, that as often as he could find the time between his expeditions, Haast spent from midnight Saturday till midnight Sunday studying the rocks exposed. No other day was available, as the tunnellers worked three eight-hour shifts. Public holidays were no doubt gala days for the lonely geologist. His work was so thorough that he was able in 1867 to send a copy of an excellent geological survey of the tunnel together with two hundred geological specimens by way of illustration to the Paris Exhibition.
Notwithstanding the physical exertions demanded by these long exploring journeys and the many hours required for the sorting and classifying of the treasures gathered by the way, Haast found time to read countless addresses, including a course of lectures on geology for the Boys' High School in 1867, and to publish numerous articles in the leading scientific papers of the world. In 1868 when the provincial council decided to dispense with the geological survey as a provincial institution, Haast was able to present the provincial government with two maps of the province, both on the scale of four miles to the inch, accompanied by 138 sections on twenty-four large sheets, and 7,887 natural history specimens of which he himself had collected 4,312 during the progress of the survey, the other 3,575 being secured, by his efforts, from foreign countries.
In 1868 the exploring period of Haast's life virtually ended, although he made many excursions in later years, principally for the purpose of more detailed geological study. The record of the early adventurous years, the Geology of Canterbury and Westland, published in 1879, is a romance. The scientific section is written clearly and simply, while the narrative is executed with a vividness which recalls Robinson Crusoe. 'I have endeavoured,' said Haast in the preface, 'to make the reader acquainted with the peculiarly grand features of the Southern Alps, to make him participate in the difficulties, dangers, and joys of an explorer's life, and, at the same time, to show him that the work of the Geologist in an unknown country, in which, moreover, he had to seek his way, construct his own map and carry often a heavy load on his back, is not an easy one, and that it cannot be accomplished without considerable loss of time.'
When at last the provincial government was able to set aside a sum of money for the erection of a public museum to house the collections accumulated by Haast, that geologist was inevitably appointed its first curator, a post which he held from 1870 until the time of his death. His material contribution to science was the organising, building, financing, and stocking of the Canterbury Museum, for the scientific collections displayed therein were practically all the result of his industry and associations. This alone was a worthy monument.
Far more material had been collected in these early years than the museum authorities could deal with. When Allan Thomson settled down to the investigation of New Zealand fossils, he found his material to his hand. Some forty tons of treasure trove had been gathered by various individuals and expeditions, mostly during the early decades, and had gradually accumulated in the dusty and virtually unexplored recesses and garrets of the old wooden building that has been so recently demolished. Writing in 1878, Haast said that more than ten years before he had proposed sending a large series of fossils collected by him to Europe to be described by a palæontologist of high position (I suppose this would be arranged through Hochstetter), but that the director of the colonial geological survey requested him not to do so, assuring him that the assistance of an expert palæontologist would be procured at an early date. Haast continued, 'However, I am truly sorry that hitherto the necessary work has not been accomplished.' I have no doubt that these fossils formed portion of the large deposit that Thomson fell heir to, when in 1907 the palæontologist was duly appointed. The greater part of the treasure was packed in whisky cases, which appears to date the collection to a period before 1880, as from then on till 1910 kerosene cases were the favourite means of packing, to be replaced in their turn by old motor cases. This information may possibly be of some aid to a scientist in the future.
Haast's theoretic contributions are numberless, the most spectacular being his reconstruction of firstly the vast glacial activities that held sway over the southern portion of New Zealand, and secondly the volcanic activities that rocked Banks Peninsula. In addition his discovery of polished stone implements in Bruce Bay in 1868, together with the results of excavations in a cave on the Sumner road and in the moa-hunter encampments on the north bank of the Rakaia, led him to the conclusion that a race had existed in New Zealand prior to the Maoris, and that this race of moa hunters had reached a point analogous to that of the neolithic inhabitants of Europe and America. This 'interesting people', who had associations with India or Ceylon, were not cannibals and did not possess a domesticated dog or implements of greenstone.
Haast devoted his later years chiefly to setting in order his beloved Canterbury Museum. When Canterbury University College was established, Haast was appointed its first lecturer in geology in 1873, becoming professor in that subject three years later, a position which he held conjointly with that of curator of the museum. In 1886 he went to London as the colony's commissioner to the Colonial and Indian Exhibition. He died in 1887 shortly after his return to New Zealand.
For many years Haast's work had received the recognition of the scientific world. As early as 1862 the University of Tübingen had conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Philosophy in recognition of his report on the Nelson province. In the same year he was elected corresponding member of the Imperial Geographical, Zoological, and Geological Societies of Vienna, to be followed in 1863 by similar honours bestowed by the Geological Societies of London, Edinburgh, Berlin, the Royal Societies of Dublin and Victoria, and the Linnaean Society of London. In 1865 the Ritterkreuz of the Imperial and Royal Austrian order of Francis Joseph was conferred upon him. Two years later came his election as Fellow of the Royal Society of London and as foreign corresponding member of the Société de Géographie. He became a Fellow of the Naturforschende Gesellschaft in Berlin in 1869, and received the hereditary distinction of the prefix 'von' in 1876. In 1884 Dr von Haast received the royal medal of the Royal Geographical Society, and finally was made k.c.m.g. in 1886 at the instance of the Prince of Wales.
Sir Julius von Haast was a geologist of outstanding eminence, possessed of a considerable acquaintance with botany and zoology. He was foremost among the geomorphologists of New Zealand in the last century. He was indisputably a great scientist. Withal he was a man full of human interest, a good singer and violinist, a charming companion, one who made friends everywhere and who forced his friends to become interested in his schemes and projects for the advancement of science. He was the Seddon of science, and like Seddon had the fortune to find in the New Zealand of his day an ideal opportunity for the development of his strong personality, boundless energy, and great talent.
5 Hector
Likevon Haast, Hector was attracted to New Zealand by the opportunities it offered for original research. While he accomplished difficult and strenuous original work in his early years, he was later to find that he had a particular talent for directing and co-ordinating the scientific labours of others.
James Hector was born at Edinburgh on 18 March 1834. His father, a great friend of Sir Walter Scott, was a Writer to the Signet. (The father of every famous Scot seems to have been a Writer to the Signet, but the phrase, with all its seeming romance, is virtually only a synonym for Crown Solicitor.) His mother was a niece of Dr Barclay, the teacher of Owen who was afterwards popularly credited with the reconstruction of the moa from a single bone of the leg—an instance of gross popular exaggeration. At the age of fourteen he entered his father's office for a short period, and was then apprenticed to an actuary for three years. He early showed a bent for chemical and natural history studies, and after matriculating in 1852, he left office work finally and entered the University of Edinburgh to study under Edward Forbes. There he duly graduated m.d. in 1856. He had no desire to be a surgeon, but at that time it was impossible to study science at the university without keeping terms in medicine. Thus Owen and Huxley, as well as many other scientists, had perforce to study medicine.
Curiously enough the situation was reversed in the next generation: Hector's son, Dr C. Monro Hector, was a doctor by choice, a scientist by avocation, and became a valued astronomical worker.
Hector devoted as much of his time at the university as he could to natural science, especially geology. There was no separate chair of geology at Edinburgh, but Edward Forbes and Professors Balfour and Jameson gave him extremely efficient instruction. During the vacations he made long walking excursions through England and Scotland studying geology and natural history. His graduation thesis on The Antiquity of Man showed clearly his bent towards pure science.
Hector had proved such an able student at Edinburgh that in March 1857 he was selected by Sir Roderick Murchison, director-general of the geological survey of Great Britain, to act as surgeon and geologist with an expedition to explore the western part of British North America. The expedition was in charge of Captain John Palliser, and the programme entailed a four years' survey of the area west of Lake Superior and north of the 49th parallel, principally with a view to settlement possibilities, and also to search for passes suitable for horses through the Rockies to British Columbia. A great deal of the scientific work of the expedition fell to Hector, but he was a young man of twenty-three afraid neither of work nor of responsibility. When the expedition went into winter quarters while the snow lay on the ground, it was Hector's practice to take a volunteer or two and an Indian guide and to explore the prairie country on snow-shoes and with dog-sleighs. Over a thousand miles were covered in this way, the bill of fare consisting of inadequate supplies of pemmican diversified by chance game. On the expedition to search for a pass in the Rockies, the party split. Palliser in charge of one group searched the more southern reaches of the mountains, while Hector led the other group farther north. It fell to the latter group to discover the most practicable pass, the well-known Kicking Horse Pass, now used by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company for their trunk line from Montreal to Vancouver. This discovery nearly ended in disaster for Hector, as the name of the pass indicates, for there he was kicked severely in the chest by the animal he immortalised.
After three hard years the expedition returned to England in 1860, its great work, the discovery of a practicable route from the east to the west coast of Canada, accomplished. Hector was the hero of the hour. The geological material with which he returned secured his immediate appointment as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Geological Society of London, and the Royal Geographical Society. He was awarded the precious gold medal of the last-named society, and his future was assured.
The immediate result was the offer in 1861 of two positions, one—political agent and geologist to Kashmir State—a very well paid position, and the other —provincial geologist to the province of Otago—a less remunerative post at the other end of the world with little prospects of other than hard work. Hector applied for advice to Sir Roderick Murchison who recommended Otago. As we know, Kashmir's loss was New Zealand's gain, and Hector arrived in Dunedin on 15 April 1862.
Hector was engaged for three years from 1 November 1861, at £800 per year, with an assistant at £300 per year. He was required first, to devote all his time and abilities till its completion to a geological survey of the province, and to deliver the results of the survey to the superintendent, and, second, at the completion of the survey, to furnish specimens of all the minerals of the province. On his arrival he immediately plunged into work, organising his office and surveying his domain. Very little work had been done on the geology of Otago save for a few observations by Dr Forbes of the Acheron and for a brief survey by Dr Lauder Lindsay who was one of the first to mention the evidence of former glacial action in New Zealand.
From April to September 1862 Hector undertook a preliminary reconnaissance of one-third of the province, during which he collected over 500 fossil specimens, duly classified by him on his return. On 27 August he forwarded his first report to the superintendent, a very valuable sketch report on the geology of the Manuherikia valley, pointing out the enormous erosion that had taken place in that area. The Molyneux (Clutha) river and tributaries had removed deposits several hundred feet in thickness from an area of at least 800 square miles. He predicted that no main seam of gold would be found, but that patchy deposits of great richness could be expected. The gold during the lapse of vast ages, he explained, had been sifted and separated by the sluicing action of the river from the debris of the schistose rocks and had thus been concentrated in a smaller and smaller quantity of wash gravel. Within a few weeks of this announcement enterprising miners, who ransacked the whole Taieri basin, abundantly verified Hector's opinions.
In this report Hector first mentioned his mistaken theory of the older and newer Tertiary deposits. The central Otago basin, he claimed, as it passed through the successive stages of submergence became partially filled with deposits classified as older Tertiary deposits. When the level of the land rose again and the basin became drained by lakes and rivers, a second layer of debris was deposited—the newer Tertiary deposits. This theory provided a glorious opportunity for the personal recriminations in which the scientists of that day rejoiced. When the din of battle had died away, Hector himself came to modify the opinions which had so infuriated some of his colleagues.
Hector's next excursion was to discover a practicable land route to the West Coast, but a short journey convinced him that an opening could best be discovered from the West Coast. In May 1863 therefore he set out on an historic expedition to the West Coast sounds. A small twenty-ton schooner-rigged yacht, the Matilda Hayes, was selected, and her limited accommodation was turned to such account that she was able to carry nine persons with provisions for six months. On 29 May after an early breakfast at Bluff 'on mutton bird, a disagreeable Maori delicacy, which I tasted for the first time', the real work began. Stewart Island was the first port of call, but the welcome was not so enthusiastic as that given a few days later to the schooner Wild Wave, overdue from Invercargill with eagerly awaited provisions for the settlers, who had been reduced for some time past 'to a diet of cockles and woodhens'.
Five weeks were spent in geological observation in Preservation Inlet, the weather being atrocious and the winds contrary. The only accident of the trip occurred while the yacht was attempting to beat out of this sound: 'The yacht rolled heavily and in making sail the main boom broke loose by accident and knocked two of us down, and unfortunately dislocated my left shoulder joint. However, with the aid of one of the seamen, who had been treated for a similar mishap himself, I managed to reduce it and have the necessary bandages applied.' However 'we had great reason to be thankful for the temporary south-east breeze which enabled us to escape in time from our perilous position on the weather side of the Balleny reef.'
Thompson and Doubtful sounds were next surveyed, and some time was spent at Milford, where Hector ventured to the source of the Cleddau river and satisfied himself that no easy pass existed to the east. As Milford had such a good entrance, however, he believed that 'by blasting or quarrying, a sufficient extent of wharf frontage might be obtained where vessels may be safely moored, although the water is too deep for anchorage.' That work after the lapse of three-quarters of a century is now under way.
Hector next proceeded to Martin's Bay, and deciding that an easy pass existed, he left his schooner and men at Lake McKerrow. Accompanied by Mr Hutchinson, owner of the Matilda Hayes, who had shipped as one of the hands in order to see the West Coast, and by two others, Hector proceeded up the Hollyford river, over the divide into the Eglinton valley and continued by an easy route to Lake Wakatipu and so by coach to Dunedin. There he had the pleasure of reporting his arrival 'to his Honour on the 7th. October', and of redeeming his promise to communicate with the government within five months from the date the expedition started. He did not learn until his arrival in Dunedin that he had been preceded in this Hollyford route by Alabaster and Caples.
After every journey Hector devoted much time to preparing specimens to form the nucleus of a museum. In December 1862 he held a public display of the Survey Department's collection, which so impressed the provincial authorities that £400 was voted for the construction of a temporary museum to be attached to the Geological Department.
The success of this very small exhibition led some men to believe that a larger one embracing the whole of New Zealand would give a strong impetus to the exploitation of the resources of the colony. Hector was appointed a commissioner for this exhibition, and in 1864 he toured the provinces in order to secure their support for the scheme. When the exhibition was opened in 1865, Hector's collection, in the cataloguing of which he was aided by Dr Lauder Lindsay, was one of the most complete there. Although burdened with these extra duties, he was able to complete his survey of Otago by April 1865, when he severed his connection with that province. His survey he admitted was only of a general kind and called for more detailed study.
The Weld Government realised the need of co-ordinating the geological work done in the various provinces. For this task it appointed Hector director of the geological survey in New Zealand, a position which he held from 1865 until his retirement in 1903. This position proved to be really that of trusted adviser to the government on all matters of science and higher education, and for forty years he bestrode his 'narrow world like a Colossus'. Besides controlling the geological survey activities, he organised, developed, and managed the Colonial Museum, the government laboratory, the botanical gardens, and the Meteorological Office. He proved an able and very approachable administrator.
Hector's organising abilities were so well recognised that in 1879 he was appointed executive commissioner to the Sydney Exhibition, on which occasion he wrote a very able Handbook of New Zealand, briefly summarising its geology, geography, and history. A year later he was appointed commissioner to the Melbourne Exhibition. He contributed largely to the success of the Wellington Exhibition of 1885, for which service he was knighted. To the Indian and Colonial Exhibition (1886) in London he sent models of Milford Sound and Ruapehu, an extensive collection of casts of extinct New Zealand reptilia, and a model of New Zealand.
The New Zealand Institute was, however, the object nearest his heart, the field where he best displayed the versatility and catholicity of his scientific knowledge. It is his enduring monument. That body was incorporated by The New Zealand Institute Act, 1867, framed by Hector. It was intended to serve as a parent and directing organisation of the various local philosophical societies already established or visualised, and to draw together the New Zealand scientists working in their different fields. The act provided for a board of governors consisting of ex-officio and nominated members, and for a manager to be appointed by the government. Hector was nominated manager and dominated the proceedings for thirty- five years. He voluntarily edited the Transactions for all those years, and perusal of the volumes shows that this work alone was a full task. Every number showed his personal touch in arrangement, comments, and choice of papers; but in addition he published seventy original papers of his own during the thirty-five years. Besides numerous articles on geology, he wrote ably on botanical and zoological subjects, and on anatomy, for he had an all-round knowledge of science. He was a very efficient man for many years, but after a time the strain of his early life began to tell, and he seened incapable of prolonged concentration. His autocratic methods were without parallel, but his tact and diplomacy overcame every difficulty, until in 1903 the long-simmering discontent at his dictatorship forced the reconstruction of the Institute on a more democratic basis. As he was then just on seventy years of age, he no doubt found that his abdication had its compensations. In the same year, 1903, he ended his long official association with the University of New Zealand by resigning the chancellorship. He had held this office since 1885, and had been a member of the university senate since its foundation.
A feature of Hector's career was the many friends he made. He was a close personal friend of every scientist in the New Zealand of his time, though frequently their doughty opponent in scientific debate and activities. He engendered a remarkable loyalty in his subordinate officers. His close contact with successive governments and his incontestable executive ability enabled him to dominate science and thought to an unparalleled degree.
Hector was the recipient of numerous honours, among them being the Order of the Golden Cross conferred by the German Emperor in 1874 and the Lyell medal awarded to him by the Geological Society in 1877. In 1875 he was created c.m.g., and in 1886 was created k.c.m.g. The greatest triumph of his career however was the wonderful reception he received from the Canadian government and people when in 1905 he paid a visit to the scene of his former activities. The visit partook almost of the nature of a royal progress, and a monument was erected to his honour by the Canadian government at the highest point of the Great Divide in order to commemorate his youthful discoveries. The trip was tragically marred, however, for Hector's son Douglas, who accompanied him, contracted pneumonia and died at Revelstoke, British Columbia, close to the Kicking Horse Pass. Sir James returned to Wellington a broken man and died not long after in 1907.
6 Hutton
Hutton differed somewhat from Haast and Hector in that the study of science was for him not so much an end in itself as a means to a greater end—the discovery of a rational theory of life. Hutton was a scientist and a philosopher. He was profoundly influenced by Darwin, and he rejoiced at every advance in geology, biology, and zoology as adding yet another link to the long evolutionary chain. But he was not content with the material record of life alone, and sought in the light of what he knew of the progress of this world to reflect on the possible climax of that progress, and on the existence of a world of the mind.
No one observing the careers of Haast, Hector, and Hutton in 1857 could possibly have predicted what lay before them. In 1857 Haast was a hearty, bearded fellow thirty-three years of age, strolling with a violin, a pleasing baritone voice, a geological hammer, and a kit of plant and rock specimens, through the most agreeable countries of Europe. Hector was an adventurous youth of twenty-three, exploring the Rockies. Hutton was a young soldier of twenty-one, fighting with the 23rd Royal Welsh Fusiliers in the Indian Mutiny. If we observe these men once more in 1880, we find that Haast was in control of the Canterbury Museum which, owing its existence largely to his exertions, was the finest museum in the southern hemisphere; that Hector was the undisputed head of all the scientific activities of the New Zealand Government, the manager of the New Zealand Institute, his brief years of rough service forgotten in the preoccupations of executive office; that Hutton, his sword exchanged for the scalpel, was professor of biology at Canterbury College, the authority on New Zealand mollusca, and a scholar who viewed evolution as a process 'that was destined eventually to raise man to the level of the angels.'
Captain Frederick Wollaston Hutton was born in Lincolnshire in 1836. His father was the Rev. H. F. Hutton, vicar of Gate Burton, Lincolnshire; but his mother was one of the Wollaston family, a clan with the proud record of having provided more Fellows of the Royal Society than any other family. His uncle, Thomas Vernon Hutton, was a close personal friend of, and co-worker with, Darwin. These scientific associations account for Captain Hutton's early interest in biology and the theory of evolution. He was educated at Southwell and the Gosport Naval Academy. He served for three years in the India Mercantile Marine and then in 1854 entered the applied science department of King's College, London, to qualify as a civil engineer. On the outbreak of the Crimean War he received his commission as ensign in the 23rd Royal Welsh Fusiliers. After active service in the Crimea, he went as lieutenant to India, there to survive the perils of the Mutiny. He served under Sir Colin Campbell at the relief of Lucknow and the battle of Cawnpore. Those were stirring days indeed for young lieutenants. After a period of service in Malta he returned to England to complete his training at Sandhurst and Woolwich, specialising in geology and mineralogy. He had always been interested in geology, and in 1860 he was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society.
In 1860 occurred the event which coloured all his later life—his conversion to Darwinism. While he was on a scientific excursion to the Isle of Wight, Sir Andrew Ramsay, director of the geological survey of Great Britain, convinced him of the qualities of the Origin of Species. He studied the book for six months, at the end of which he published a review in The Geologist during 1861. This article, whose faults the author keenly realised later, showed such a remarkable comprehension of the attainments and the limits of the evolutionary theory that Darwin himself sent Hutton a letter of appreciation. And, in writing to a friend, Darwin commented on this article by an unknown Lieutenant Hutton: 'He is one of the very few who see that the change of species cannot be directly proved, and that the doctrine must sink or swim according as it groups and explains phenomena.'
Hutton's studies were still predominantly military however. In 1861 he passed out of the Staff College at Sandhurst, sixth in his year, being gazetted captain in 1862 and placed on staff duties. In that year he married Annie Gouger Montgomerie, daughter of a dabbler in science who had been presented with the gold medal of the Society of Arts for having been the first to introduce the practical use of gutta percha into Europe.
During his five years in England and Ireland spent on routine military duty, Hutton devoted a considerable amount of time to geology and biology. This and the fact that war was temporarily a thing of the past were probably the reasons for his decision to leave the army and emigrate to New Zealand, where he could follow pastoral pursuits in peace and comfort. He arrived in Auckland with his wife and two children in January 1866 and settled in the Waikato. He started flaxmilling, but as he was not a conspicuous success in this trade, he soon found employment as a civil servant. He examined the coal deposits in the lower Waikato area on behalf of the provincial government, and then spent two years under the colonial government reporting on the Thames and the geology of the Great Barrier. At the request of McLean, the Minister of Colonial Defence, he reported on the defence of the harbours of Auckland, Nelson, Wellington, Lyttelton, and Port Chalmers.
When, in 1868, the Auckland Philosophical Society was instituted as an affiliated body of the newly-organised New Zealand Institute, Captain Hutton took an active part in its proceedings. His contributions were mainly of geological and biological interest, but included mathematical papers on The Flight of the Albatros and Sinking Funds. These would suggest that he was already devoting more time to science than to farming.
In 1871 Hutton removed to Wellington with a position as assistant geologist in the Geological Survey Department. Under instructions from Dr Hector he examined the Southland district. In 1873 he became provincial geologist for the province of Otago, lecturer in geology, and first curator of the Otago Museum. Hutton did very valuable work in the sorting and mounting of the numerous specimens that had been jumbled together in an old galvanised iron building ever since the exhibition of 1865. When a museum building was opened in 1877, Hutton had the material in fit condition to be displayed to the public.
As provincial geologist Hutton did some very useful work, although he was not so competent a field geologist as Haast or Hector. In the summer of 1873-4 he rode over the north-western part of the province from the Waitaki to the Clutha, and in March 1874 visited the northern part of Stewart Island and several of the West Coast sounds in the government steamer Luna. In the summer of 1874-5 he examined, principally on horseback, the remaining part of the province from the Clutha to the Waiau, thus completing the survey. The account of his observations, Report on the Geology and Goldfields of Otago, published in 1875 in collaboration with G. H. F. Ulrich and other Otago scientists, is a book noteworthy for the authoritative manner in which the geology of the province is systematised and classified. Hutton was a good palæontologist, and while Hector and his officers in the Geological Survey Department were able to point out many errors in his field observational work, Hutton was their superior in the laboratory, and in his book neglected no opportunity to point out their mistakes in the field. The Cretaceotertiary classification of Hector, which was defended so strenuously by the survey geologists, offered Hutton an opportunity for such exercises, one which he exploited in a logical style, restrained but effective.
In spite of his activities as geologist, lecturer, and curator, Hutton found time for extensive research especially in connection with marine mollusca. In 1871 he published his catalogue of New Zealand birds, to be followed by a catalogue of fishes in 1872 and by one of mollusca in 1873. The latter he expanded into a Manual of the New Zealand Mollusca, a valuable treatise with which his name will always be associated. It was an extraordinary feat virtually to complete his study of this branch of New Zealand natural history in the few busy years he had spent in this country.
In 1877 Hutton was appointed professor of natural science at the University of Otago, transferring three years later to Canterbury College where he became professor of biology and lecturer in geology. At last he found the niche he had been seeking. For twenty-five years he laboured in the laboratory at the college, or in the nearby museum of which he was made curator in 1893. This was the work in which his soul delighted. He resigned from the chair of biology, but remained attached to the college as lecturer in geology until 1902. He published several textbooks on geology, zoology, and biology, his magnum opus being the Index Faunae Novae Zealandiae, published in 1904.
Hutton was a prolific writer. He read many papers before the Canterbury Philosophical Institute, published articles of first-rate scientific importance in the journals of various societies abroad, as well as in the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute, and corresponded with men of science throughout the world. In 1891 he was awarded the Clarke medal of New South Wales for scientific research, and the following year was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. By 1900 he was recognised abroad as the leader of scientific thought in New Zealand. In that year he was made president of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, and his presidential address at Hobart was a resume of his work and thought on evolution. He had always been preoccupied with Darwinism, and some of his early lectures had shocked the orthodox of Otago. An address on Darwinism delivered at the Canterbury Philosophical Institute in 1887 was expanded into a small book, Darwinism and Lamarckism, which created a stir in 1899. He realised that the principle of natural selection did not account for transmission of character, and that the large field of heredity had still to be investigated. In The Lesson of Evolution, first published in 1902 but republished by his widow in 1907 in an enlarged memorial edition for private circulation, Hutton summed up the principal tenets of his thought. This book comprises the most scholarly contribution to scientific philosophy made by any New Zealander.
I think it was Laplace who said that if any scientist once thoroughly solved his problem he would write about it clearly and in such a manner as to be understood easily by his readers. Hutton's problem is mainly that of the evolution of mental processes, and particularly of the extent and influence of inherited memory. His writings on the theory of science, on what is known and what unknown to the scientific world, appeal both to the intellect and to the literary sense. He realised the significance of the advances in scientific knowledge in his day, as well as their limitations. Although he was able to reconcile Darwinism and religion, he conveyed a fairly clear idea of where science ended and faith began. He systematised and classified the assumptions and the evidence. He gave in part, as Cotton was to do more completely for geomorphology, a framework for future workers to build on. If, as seems unlikely, the problem of the evolution of mental processes is solved by this civilisation, Hutton's work will be a useful factor in its solution.
Hutton envisaged the progress of the material universe from the beginnings of whirling cosmic dust through the many stages until animate life became possible, and so on until, with all its energy dissipated, there would remain only space and myriads of dead stars. No scientist could know when and how inanimate life had given place to living organisms. Hutton considered that evolution was due to intelligent design, and that, at a certain stage in its development, matter had been acted on by mind, for mind and matter were essentially different. As through the ages lower forms of life had given way to higher, the scientist philosopher trusted that a body would eventually become unnecessary to the existence of mind. Thus he states in The Lesson of Evolution: 'I cannot believe that the process of evolution is meaningless. I cannot believe that evolution will have no permanent effect. I cannot believe that after the material universe has passed away, the universal mind, which ordered it, will be exactly as it was before psychological evolution began. If mind is indestructible, the evolved human mind must react on the universal mind and change it. And thus I feel constrained to believe that psychological evolution may continue after the death of the body, in which the mind is temporarily encased.'
After twenty-five years of thought and labour in the seclusion of his study in Christchurch, Hutton left for a holiday trip to England in the S.S. Rimutaka in March 1905. On 27 October, while on his return trip in the same vessel, he died and was buried at sea somewhere west and north of the Cape of Good Hope. 'Life,' he had said, 'is merely the action of mind on protoplasm; it has no distinct existence in itself.' And again: 'So we come to recognise that the ultimate purpose of evolution cannot be fulfilled on the earth; and we are thus led to believe that our spirit will not perish with the body, but will, in some way or other, lead a new existence. And, as we know that on the earth better has constantly succeeded better, so we may hope it will be in the spiritual world.'
7 The Establishment of a Scientific University
The Advent of the University in New Zealand life during the seventies rather abruptly ended the period when science in this country was confined to a few explorer scientists who had received their training in old-world seats of learning. The establishment of a local university meant that science was henceforth to receive more methodical treatment and that New Zealand was to train her own scientists, although the more gifted among them would still find it necessary to undertake advanced study overseas. New Zealand was as yet a very young colony, a country divided into small and relatively isolated settlements whose interests were almost exclusively provincial. Furthermore the colonists were separated by twelve thousand miles of ocean from the centre of their national culture. These two factors considered, it is not surprising that the establishment of a university in New Zealand was attended by difficulties, strife, and confusion. Neither is it surprising that the Scots with their traditional respect for learning took the first steps towards that establishment.
The University of Otago had its origin in the fund established as part of the Otago scheme of settlement, when six hundred seceders from the Established Church of Scotland left their homeland to found a Free Church colony in New Zealand. By an agreement between the Otago Association and the New Zealand Company, all land in the Otago block was to be sold to the settlers at £2 per acre, and one-eighth of the resulting sum was to be devoted to religious and educational purposes. One-third of this fund was to be used to purchase permanent endowments and the rest used for the building of churches, schools, and a university, and in unspecified proportions to pay the stipends of ministers and teachers.
For some fifteen years the scheme of the Free Church to make Otago a university centre remained unrealised owing to the smallness and comparative poverty of the settlement. The discovery of gold at Gabriel's Gully in 1861, however, altered the position with a vengeance. The population and the wealth of the province increased sensationally, and while the northern settlements were harassed by Maori wars, Dunedin was a town throbbing with new life and anticipating boundless prosperity. Otago now could and must have its university. When the founders came to consider what type of university they should establish, they naturally had in mind the types they themselves had known in the old world. They also realised that their university should be adapted as far as possible to the needs of a new country.
Towards the end of the sixties Otago took definite steps towards the establishment of a university. In 1866 the synod agreed to allocate one-third of the fund originally set aside for religious and educational purposes to the endowment of chairs in connection with a university or college at Dunedin. The next few years witnessed enthusiastic public meetings to which the superintendent, James Macandrew, gave his warmest support. Finally the synod in 1868 urged the importance of the matter on the superintendent and stated its willingness to endow a chair of mental and moral philosophy. On 3 June 1869 the Otago provincial council felt sufficiently confident of public support to pass the University of Otago Ordinance. This incorporated a university with power to grant degrees in arts, medicine, law, and music, to be governed by a council of twelve, of whom at least six were to be laymen appointed in the first place at the nomination of the superintendent, and by a senate of graduates to be established as soon as the number of these should reach thirty. No religious test was to be administered to any student, graduate, or officer of the university, so that the generosity and impartiality of the church were beyond cavil. The first meeting of the Otago university council was held on 10 November of the same year, when a significant message from the superintendent was read. Mr Macandrew ventured to express the opinion that 'while due provision should be made for classical and metaphysical studies, there should be equal, if not greater prominence given to the teaching of Natural Science. I have long thought that a School of Mines and of Agricultural Chemistry would be of great practical importance in this province, and I earnestly hope to find in the University of Otago that, inter alia, provision will be made for these.'
When the university council looked carefully into the matter, however, it discovered that the hundred thousand acres set aside by the province as a land endowment would finance only two chairs, one of classics and English language and literature, and a second of mathematics and natural philosophy. It therefore appealed for aid to the provincial council for a further grant to provide a professor of natural science (chemistry and mineralogy). The appeal was successful so that with the chair of mental and moral philosophy endowed by the Presbyterian synod, the new university had four chairs. All these chairs were of equal status, and it was unprecedented in the history of English or colonial universities that a chair of natural science should be one of the foundation chairs and, above all, be made one of equal status with the others. The emolument of each professor was fixed at £600 per annum with class fees added (£600 was approximately equivalent to £1,500 of New Zealand currency to-day), and was therefore based on a very liberal scale. The positions were advertised, a building provided, and the Otago authorities had reason to be optimistic about the future.
Meanwhile a movement (in which can be discerned provincial and sectarian jealousies as well as more creditable motives) had been launched to establish a colonial university. The Otago council expressed its willingness to merge its institution and endowments with those of any other colleges to be established in New Zealand, on the understanding that the New Zealand University would be a teaching body with headquarters in Dunedin and with a council of twenty, of which most of the Otago university council would be members. Accordingly there was no Otago opposition to the passing of the New Zealand University Act, 1870, by the central government. This act provided for a New Zealand University, with a nominated council of twenty, to whom was given the power to confer degrees in arts, medicine, law, and music, and to affiliate such colleges as it deemed fit. A sum of £3,000 was to be set aside annually for the purposes of the university, including maintenance, stipends, scholarships, and a library fund. The council of the University of Otago was empowered to agree with the council of the University of New Zealand for its own dissolution and the transference of its endowments to the University of New Zealand. If the Otago council did not enter into this agreement within six months, then the University of New Zealand might be established at some other place in the colony. This proviso was soon to prove invaluable to Otago's opponents.
The act was passed on 13 September and the Otago council deferred the final choice of its professors until it learned the constitution of the new council. Dissatisfaction with the small representation granted to Otago and with the exclusion of Dr Burns and Dr Stuart, the two leaders of education in the province, converted Otago's approval into strong opposition. Moreover, since the council of the New Zealand University was not gazetted until 18 February, the Otago council had no opportunity of conferring with it within the six months stipulated by the act. The possibility of reaching an agreement now appeared remote, and the professorial appointments to the University of Otago were finalised in the persons of Professors Shand, Sale, and Macgregor.
The council of the New Zealand University continued its negotiations with the Otago council, but in an uncompromising manner calculated to ruin all chances of agreement. In opposition to the spirit of the act, and careless of the opinions of the government, it decided that the University of New Zealand was to be an examining body, and as it considered the time was not ripe for establishing a teaching university elsewhere in the colony, eight secondary schools were affiliated under the new act and £500 was allotted for scholarships tenable at these schools. The council refused to accede to the requests of Otago, that a compulsory and reasonable curriculum of studies should be set up giving equal status to science and that students under fifteen should not be admitted to the university. The University of Otago could not possibly affiliate with the new body, and carried on as a separate university with remarkable success for four years and actually conferred one degree.
Otago's request in 1872 for a royal charter was in vain. However, a solution to the impasse was to come from another quarter. In 1873 the Canterbury provincial council passed an ordinance setting up a teaching university college to be affiliated only with the University of New Zealand. The board of governors of Canterbury College suggested that the two provincial universities co-operate to solve the affiliation problem. After joint discussions Canterbury and Otago agreed to be affiliated to the University of New Zealand provided firstly that the standard of the degrees be kept up to that of Melbourne University, and secondly that students be given equal facilities for taking their degrees either in science or classics. Hence a New Zealand University Act, 1874, was passed. It provided for a University of New Zealand to be a purely examining body, which apart from examining the candidates of affiliated institutions, could not interfere with the management of those colleges.
When the University of New Zealand applied for a royal charter and quoted the degrees of arts, law, science, medicine, and music, mentioned in the University Act, the Crown was quite ready to grant the request in so far as it related to degrees in arts, law, medicine, and music. But only if the New Zealand act was amended to exclude the degree of science in the meantime would the required letters patent be granted. The New Zealand University Amending Act was therefore passed in 1875, the charter being granted a year later. It was not till 1884 that a supplementary charter was granted allowing degrees in science to be conferred. The New Zealand University managed to evade the imperial dictatorship in one instance, that of Mr Saul Solomon who was the first student to complete a science course, although the name of the degree conferred upon him in 1877 was Bachelor of Arts. The first student actually to gain a B.Sc. degree was Charles Chilton, Otago, 1888.
The importance and advantages of a teaching university are not always clearly recognised even to-day (though Royal Commissions of 1879 and 1925 favoured such a scheme), but there is no doubt that the foundation and successful work of the University of Otago were decisive in shaping the growth of the University of New Zealand. Firstly the Otago council in selecting its three professors (the fourth was chosen by the Presbyterian Church of Otago) paid special attention to their aptitude for teaching, since it was considered that the 'tutorial element' would enter largely into their duties for many years and that the teaching university was the correct ideal. Secondly it recognised that the success of the university would depend upon the character and status in the community of the first professors and for this reason placed their emolument on a very liberal basis and ensured that only men of sterling character and commanding personality should be selected. Thirdly they insisted on science being placed on an equal footing with classics in their curriculum. The radical nature of the idea that science should be given an equal place with classics in the studies and degrees of a university can hardly be appreciated by this generation of New Zealanders. Suffice it to say that science was practically a non-existent study at any English secondary school in 1870 and that it was still fettered to the medical degree at the university. The provision, if any, made for its teaching was so meagre as to make 'the unwitting laugh but the judicious grieve', as indeed Prince Albert had grieved a few years before. For instance at Eton, 'with a staff of thirty-five masters, three only were available for the teaching of modern languages, physical science, natural history, English language and literature, drawing, and music.' The unfortunate master who had to 'double the parts' of science master and music master conveys a fair picture of the status of science in education at that time. Such instances were all too numerous.
The signal success of the University of Otago settled all doubts as to the wisdom of the course pursued. When Canterbury College in its turn came in 1875 to select professors and draw up a curriculum, the example of Otago had perforce to be copied if any success was to be attained in rivalry with the older college. For the ideals fought for so heroically by the University of Otago, our foundation college, generations of New Zealand students have reason to be grateful.
8 The Early Professors
New Zealand had been singularly fortunate in the calibre of the pioneer scientists attracted to her shores in the early days, and she owed much in observational science to men like Haast, Hector, and Hutton. Now that the expanding field of scientific work in this country called for more detailed and specialised study, New Zealand was to be as fortunate in the professors who were appointed to diffuse a knowledge of science among young New Zealanders. For by 1875 a new impetus was required if science was to progress. The preliminary surveys, observations, and explorations were virtually completed. What was wanted was the training of a band of young New Zealanders to digest, correlate, and classify more minutely the information that these great men and their followers had gathered. This entailed the adoption of a new scientific outlook. The fostering of that outlook was a task which had become too vast for the few pioneer scientists to accomplish unaided. Men were now needed whose principal occupation was to teach science. New Zealand was exceedingly fortunate in the calibre and character of the men selected for this purpose.
The council of the newly-established university in Otago, as we have seen, desired to ensure that university growth in New Zealand should proceed along the lines they considered essential for the needs of a new country. Great pains were taken to acquire a competent professoriate, as is shown by the following statement of the requirements, sent to the provincial agent in England: 'The religious denominations and nationality of the professors are matters of comparative indifference; but it is of the utmost importance that they should be catholic in spirit, and of irreproachable moral character. It is also highly desirable that they should be men of generous instincts, and of amiable and attractive dispositions, so as to attach to themselves and to the University a large number of the youth of the Province and the Colony. It is also necessary that the professors should be gentlemen in all respects,—in appearance, in manner and in feeling—so that they may beneficially affect, and prove examples of good to, the young men who will successively come under the sphere of their influence. They should be earnest men, inspired with a large measure of enthusiasm, and certain to throw their whole heart and soul into their work. They should also be gentlemen of proved industry and energy, who would not rest satisfied with a merely perfunctory performance of their official duty, but who should labour heartily and unweariedly in extending the usefulness of the University, and in advancing the cause of education and learning throughout the Province and Colony. It is scarcely necessary to state that in addition to very high scholastic attainments, candidates should produce evidence of their being possessed of "aptness to teach", and of their having been eminently successful in work of a similar nature to that which they would be called upon to perform as professors in the University of Otago. Although it is very far from the intention of the Council that the professors should act as mere schoolmasters, yet in all probability it will be found necessary to give a place to some extent to the tutorial element. As so much of the success of the institution will depend on the start given to it by its first professors, it is the more necessary that these gentlemen should be possessed of original minds, large views, and great practical sagacity. They should rather be comparatively young men, who have been highly successful in similar, though perhaps humbler, spheres of exertion, and who have given undoubted proofs of the possession of such qualities as to lead to the conviction that they will zealously and successfully co-operate in carrying out the high objects which the promoters of the University have in view'.
The three professors appointed to Otago in 1870 satisfied every clause of these requirements. The success of the university was so pronounced and immediate that there could be no question three years later, when Canterbury College was being established, but that the example of Otago should be followed to the letter. The salaries were fixed on the same liberal scale to ensure the appointment of able men. Science was made equal with classics in all ways. The standard of the syllabus was made approximately equal to that of the universities elsewhere and all tendency for the university to assume the status of a technical college or night school was sternly resisted, although non-matriculated students were not entirely debarred from attendance at lectures.
The excellent work achieved by Professor Sale in classics and by Professor Macgregor in philosophy lies outside the scope of this book. It is sufficient to state that the University of Otago was equally fortunate in its choice of professors for arts and science. The professor of mathematics and natural science, John Shand, was born in Elgin, Scotland, in 1834. He graduated M.A. from the University of Aberdeen in 1854. He was twelve years a teacher of mathematics before coming out to New Zealand in 1871 to take over the foundation chair of mathematics and natural science. When in 1886 his department was divided into two chairs, he chose physics, and until 1913, that is for forty-two years and until he was nearly eighty years of age, he lectured in that subject. His course of lectures was a model of orderly sequence and thoroughness. He had mastered the art of imparting knowledge. It was always recognised that a student who had properly digested a full copy of Shand's lectures was sure of examination success. Not that Shand himself revered the examination system—indeed he devoted much of his time to attempts at its reformation. It was the teacher who was wanted in New Zealand a great deal more than the examiner, wrote Shand in 1877. He preferred institutions where examinations were not looked upon as an end in themselves, but were regarded as subordinate and subservient to teaching. It was his extraordinary-capacity for university business and his flair for shaping the course and conduct of educational affairs generally that made Dr Shand the invaluable member of the educational community that he proved himself. He was known through New Zealand as an authority on educational questions. He has been described as the honoured father of the university senate and of the Otago professorial board. He was three times chairman of the Otago education board, and for ten years a member of the board of governors of the Otago High Schools. Few members of the University of New Zealand have exercised a more commanding influence on its progress, or played a more important part in the growth and regulation of higher education in general.
James Gow Black, the 'Herd Laddie', another foundation professor of the University of Otago, stalked through the province for forty years, a figure of romance, a challenge to the imagination, and a perpetual joy to his students. He was born at Drumtochty in 1835, the son of a humble Scottish farmer, and he had to provide as best he could for his own education. It was a laborious struggle, but his powerful frame, remarkable powers of endurance, and his unquenchable enthusiasm enabled him to persevere so that he graduated M.A. at Edinburgh University in 1864, gained his B.Sc. degree in 1866, and finally became the first doctor of science in chemistry at Edinburgh University, and the first professor of chemistry in New Zealand. Lord Lyon Playfair, once professor of chemistry at Edinburgh, in a speech in the House of Commons, referred to Black as an illustration of the power and glory of Scottish education, with these words: 'A few weeks ago, it was my duty as University examiner, to recommend a student for the high degree of D.Sc. This graduate was the son of a poor Highland Crofter, and, when a boy, went out to herd cattle during the summer from March to October. His wages for seven months were only twenty-five shillings; but they were enough to pay his fees at the parish school during the winter. The school was six miles from his father's hut; but a walk of twelve miles to and fro, over a bleak moorland, does not deter a promising Scotch boy from going to school. It did deter, however, some of the farmers' sons of the neighbourhood. So, at fourteen, my young friend took up a little "adventure school" to teach these less hardy lads; and, in course of time, he made enough to carry him to the Borough School at Perth. Still working, still teaching, still saving, he fought his way step by step by bursaries and scholarships, till he became a certificated teacher of the first class under the Privy Council, then M.A., then B.Sc., and finally D.Sc.'
This young Highlander with the splendid physique, who had striven so hard for his education, soon became a striking figure in the Scottish settlement of Otago and provided an excellent advertisement for the new college. All he did was surrounded with the halo of romance—his lectures, his experiments, his public appearances. This extended even to his assistant, and no one has really felt the need to use Dominie Sampson's favourite ejaculation 'prodeegious' who has not seen Wully Gudlet wipe the chalk from the blackboard at the end of some triumphant demonstration. Black had a wide acquaintance with the many branches of science, and lectured in a spirited and able fashion on chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and metallurgy. His lectures were not confined to the university, and those conducted by him in the mining centres earned him considerable popularity. But Dr Black had one human weakness—a love for 'futball'. All members of the university fifteen ran and passed and kicked with one thought in their mind: no one must let the Doctor down. Success in the game was not unrelated to success in classes, so it was said. 'Hay—Wull Hay is a gude futballer, Wully, put him down for seventy-two.' Can anyone doubt that it was this stirring and dramatic figure that attracted young Joe Mellor, the artisan in the Dunedin boot factory in 1890, and that led him on to a career rivalling Black's in endurance and enthusiasm until he outstripped his old professor in his encyclopaedic knowledge of chemical science?
Nor when the Canterbury professors commenced their duties in 1875, were they any less adapted for their pioneering task. Bickerton was the first science professor at the college established in Christchurch under the auspices of the classical culture represented by Tancred, Rolleston, and Bowen. Born in Hampshire in 1842, he was trained as an engineer, but after a few years in railway survey work he withdrew in 1864 to the Cotswold Hills to establish a factory to develop certain wood-working processes he had invented. In 1867 he was teaching a technical class in Birmingham. There he won a Royal Exhibition at the School of Mines, London. In London, aided by Sir Charles Dilke, he conducted classes in which he experimented with new methods of teaching science. Three years later he was appointed to organise the science work at Hartley Institute, Southampton. He taught at Winchester College, and held the post of county analyst. His teaching work and the thesis which he published as a result of his researches on the correlation of heat and electricity made his name and led to his being offered the choice of five university chairs in 1873. He selected Canterbury and was professor of physics and chemistry there for over thirty years. He had a gift for public demonstration that was invaluable in those early days, and an almost divine enthusiasm for science that at times carried him to excess. His lectures were hopelessly unmethodical but were interspersed with fragments of scientific enthusiasm and forecasting that approached the sublime. His great theory of partial impact is now taking its rightful place in science.
For a brief exposition of this theory see pp. 131-2.
Many American astronomers, who apparently have never heard of Bickerton, are now publishing speculations that pass for original contributions of great value, but are really very incomplete compared with the theory enunciated by Professor Bickerton. His defects were the defects of his qualities, and his qualities were invaluable assets for a new and groping college.
The first Canterbury professor of mathematics and natural philosophy was Charles Henry Herbert Cook. He was born in London in 1844, and went to Australia at an early age. After graduating at Melbourne University he returned to England to study at Cambridge whence he emerged as sixth wrangler in the mathematical tripos of 1872. He was reading for the Bar, but within a year of being called he decided to accept the position of professor at Canterbury College. Soon after his arrival in Christchurch in 1875, he was despatched to Wellington as the representative of Canterbury College to confer with the New Zealand University Senate about redrafting the constitution of the university. He was given a seat on the University Royal Commission of 1879. He was a keen advocate of university reform, and worked hard and well as a member of the senate from 1884 until he retired in 1908. He was interested in the proposed school of engineering, the establishment of which devolved mainly upon him. He was one of the most loved of all the professors. He was 'solid, serious, dignified, greatly esteemed, a very corner stone of strength and stability', and withal he was eminently kind and helpful. He was respected for his sound scholarship, and Rutherford himself acknowledged the debt he owed to the thorough training he had received from his old professor. For many years the list of university successes achieved by his pupils was an inspiring tribute to his work. His sane and cautious criticism was a wonderful offset to the exuberant genius of Bickerton and the brilliance of Macmillan Brown.
I remember an episode that could have occurred only in New Zealand. The scene was outside Springfield railway station in the days when the train journey ended there and the traveller went on by a four-horse coach to Jacksons. Cook, who was on his way to the West Coast, was an urbane, dignified figure with kindly eyes behind his scholar's glasses, discussing a knotty problem in optics with M. C. Keane. The question was one from the paper in mathematics for which Keane had sat a day or two previously. The blackboard was the dusty road. Keane that day was a lanky, gawky, unshaven youth in ragged trousers, and free from coat, collar, tie, and shoes. The professor, trim and neat, drew a figure gingerly with the ferrule of his closely furled expensive umbrella, while Keane amended it with the stubby business end of his big toe. The dust seethed round them in the summer noon as the coach horses pawed restlessly beside them, but the two were engrossed, and coach and passengers had to wait till the discussion was ended. Cook surmised that Keane had added to the long list of senior scholarships in mathematics and mathematical physics carried off by Canterbury College students. From his seat beside the driver, the professor waved farewell to us, dignified and urbane, but more happy and cherubic than ever in spite of a forgotten lunch, while Keane, Fanning, and the other of the audience shambled across for a celebration and the beer we had been waiting for. The professor had not erred, for Keane duly gained his scholarship and first-class honours.
Such incidents as this endeared the professor to his students. His popularity was not due only to the thoroughness of his teaching. He was a man of varied interests and especially loved church and choral music on which he was an authority. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of cricket and athletics. In many ways he helped establish the traditions of a university which holds a proud place in the educational life of New Zealand.
There is no doubt that these southern professors were more than mere members of a teaching staff, that they were 'a national asset' of great value. The value of their work lay not only in the able exposition of their subject, but also in the intellectual influence exerted by their personalities on the students. They gave of themselves. The religious denominations and nationalities of these men were matters of comparative indifference, for they were men of catholicity of spirit, broad views, and great practical sagacity, and so were able to promote that open-mindedness and love of knowledge for its own sake which should characterise a university education.
The wisdom of those who shaped and controlled the destinies of the young University of New Zealand was to be borne out amply in the period which succeeded that of the pioneer scientists and professors. Two young New Zealanders, Rutherford and Mellor, after graduating, were to go abroad and finally bring to fruition in the world of science the training they had received in one of its remotest outposts. It was New Zealand's good fortune that a third graduate, Cotton, was able to discover his life work, happily still in progress, within its own confines. To this triumvirate of scientists, who laboured with such conspicuous success in the period from the nineties onwards, must be added a fourth, Cockayne. Though not himself a graduate of New Zealand, his scientific labours owed a great deal to the help he received from a school of botanists, exalted by his example and direct inspiration, but ready to his hand because they had been trained in the university colleges of New Zealand. The tribute paid in the following pages to these men must therefore be regarded also as a tribute to the University of New Zealand—to its founders, teachers, and administrators.
9 Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford was born at Spring Grove, Nelson, on 30 August 1871. He was the fourth son of the marriage of James Rutherford, flaxmiller and small farmer, who had arrived in Nelson at the early age of three in April 1842, and of Martha Thompson, an accomplished schoolteacher who had arrived in New Plymouth, also at an early age, in 1855. The boy attended the primary schools at Foxhill and Havelock, at the latter winning a Marlborough Education Board scholarship at the age of fifteen. This enabled him to study at Nelson College, where he proved himself a first-class all round scholar, with special aptitude for mathematics. His English master credited him in a term report with 'a retentive memory, and a great power of reproduction.' He won a University Entrance scholarship in 1889 which led him to Canterbury College.
At least until he found his feet at Canterbury College, this boy was just the healthy, normal country youth, a little better than his companions at lessons, and about the average in football, swimming, milking cows, painting the house, and weeding the garden. Nothing of the infant prodigy appeared in his studies, habits, dress, or build. The great thing in his favour was a heritage common to most of the youth of New Zealand in 1890, namely a healthy upbringing in country surroundings, and descent from strong, intelligent parents of good pioneer stock. He was always tall and big-framed, and made a solid Rugby forward in his college days.
At Canterbury College Rutherford came under the influence of those two great professors, Cook and Bickerton, to whom long after he publicly acknowledged his debt when thanking the board of governors of Canterbury College for congratulations on the award of the Nobel Prize. 'If there is any credit,' he wrote, 'to be apportioned for winning a Nobel Prize, I think that Canterbury College may take a fair share; for it was there that I was well trained in mathematics by Professor Cook, and in physics by Professor Bickerton. Both were excellent teachers, and Professor Bickerton's genuine enthusiasm for science gave a stimulus to me to start investigations of my own. I have a happy remembrance of my old College days, and of my first researches in the basement of one of the lecture rooms. I learnt more of research methods in those first investigations, under somewhat difficult conditions, than in any work I have done since. I may mention that the Nobel Prize was awarded to me in chemistry, and not in physics. I was rather startled at first at my sudden transformation, but the work I have been engaged in for the last ten years may be called physics or chemistry at will.'
While at Canterbury College Rutherford gained a senior university scholarship in mathematics, and graduated M.A. in 1893 with double first-class honours in mathematics and physical science. He then returned for a fifth year to study for a bachelor of science degree and to continue his researches. He became interested in Hertzian waves and set himself the task of finding a suitable detector for them. He set up a Hertz oscillator in a 'miserable, cold, draughty, concrete-floored cellar, which was usually known to the students as the "den" and in which they were accustomed to hang up their caps and gowns.' He submitted the results of this investigation in a thesis for the 1851 Exhibition science scholarship. The scholarship was actually awarded to J. S. Maclaurin, the brilliant Auckland chemist, afterwards Dominion analyst, but as the latter became ineligible owing to his marriage, it was awarded to Rutherford.
The scholarship took Rutherford to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he worked as a research student under the celebrated J. J. Thomson at the Cavendish laboratory. Rutherford followed his professor in the study of the structure of the atom and of the radiations from radio-active bodies.
It may be interesting to digress a little here and to trace the conception of the atom through the ages, until the end of the nineteenth century when the work of Pierre and Madame Curie, Becquerel, Geiger, Thomson, and Rutherford, to mention only a few of the distinguished investigators, revolutionised our ideas of the structure of matter. So much has been accomplished in the last fifty years that we are inclined to forget how little was known before them.
The atom is no new conception. As early as 400 b.c.Democritus and his Greek school believed that all matter—vegetable, animal, and mineral—was composed of very minute, ultimate particles, built up in varying combinations. Lucretius in his De Rerum Natura (about 58 b.c.), a long poem Concerning the Nature of Things, reiterated this belief at some length. In the translation by William Ellery Leonard(Everyman's edition), a few lines run thus:
'Bodies, again,Are partly primal germs of things, and partlyUnions deriving from the primal germs.
. . . . .
for the samePrimordial seeds of things first move of self,And then those bodies built of unions smallAnd nearest, as it were, unto the powersOf the primeval atoms, are stirred upBy impulse of those atoms unseen blows,And these thereafter goad the next in size.'
Nor was Lucretius so very far mistaken.
For a long time there was little advance on the teaching of the ancients. In 1808 Dalton proposed his atomic theory by which all matter was held to be composed of atoms, each of the sixty or eighty known elements possessing a different atom. William Prout in 1815 went further. He pointed out that there were grounds for believing that the atomic weights of all the elements were exact multiples of either the atomic weight of hydrogen or half that of hydrogen. His theory, printed anonymously for fear of ridicule, was merely ignored. In the latter half of the nineteenth century the relative weights of these atoms were ascertained, and the results incorporated in Mendeleev's table of atomic weights, the atom of hydrogen being taken as unity. A symmetry observed in this table induced scientists to search for new elements where certain gaps suggested that such would be found. There matters stood in the early nineties when it was a common remark that 'all the major discoveries of science had been made.' Before the nineties were ended however, the 'electron' was found. J. J. Thomson proved in 1897 that the electron was a particle of negative electricity, very much smaller than the atom of hydrogen, roughly about one-thousandth of the mass of that smallest atom.
Working with Professor Thomson, Rutherford studied the radiations from uranium and other radioactive bodies. He invented a magnetic detector for electric waves and so began what Marconi completed. This, together with his discovery that uranium gave off two types of rays, which he named alpha and beta, led to his being offered a research professorship at McGill University, Montreal, where the millionaire, MacDonald, had generously endowed a physics laboratory. There from 1898 until 1907 Rutherford worked in one of the finest physics laboratories in the world. In conjunction with Professor Soddy he conducted important investigations on the alpha particles which were to provide his work for a quarter of a century. Rutherford himself proved that beta rays were particles of negative electricity, i.e. electrons, while he and Soddy correctly surmised that the alpha rays were atoms of helium. He was able to chart the rate of the rise and decay of radium emanation, and although both Becquerel and P. Curie forestalled him in publishing this rate, yet to him and Soddy belongs 'the bold and startling theory, known as the Disintegration Theory', which underlies these changes. Every subsequent discovery in radioactivity has confirmed the laws they stated in 1902, the gist of which was that as the result of the emanation of atoms of helium and electrons, the atoms of such elements as radium and uranium were being broken down and slowly transformed into sober lead. That is, a natural transmutation of elements had been discovered.
In 1903 Rutherford published his first book, Radioactivity, embodying the results of his recent researches. His work was now becoming famous. In 1903 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and the next year received the Society's Rumford medal. For his work at McGill Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1908.
Rutherford's research work may be divided into the three periods spent at the McGill, Manchester, and Cambridge universities respectively. In 1907 he left McGill to become professor of physics at Manchester, as he felt the necessity of being closer to the centre of science. At Manchester he laboured for twelve years with a large team of workers of all nationalities attracted by his fame. This second period was associated with the discovery of the nucleus of the atom.
In 1911 Rutherford discovered that the atom consisted of a dense, minute, and positively charged centre or nucleus, round which lighter negatively charged particles (electrons) revolved as planets round a sun. The number of electrons revolving in their orbits, and the number of charges of positive electricity in the nucleus (for these must balance each other) determined the element. Thus the smallest and simplest atom, that of hydrogen, consisted of a heavy proton or nucleus round which a very light electron revolved at a relatively enormous distance. The proton of hydrogen weighed 1,845 times as much as the electron, and about 100,000 electrons could be placed across the outer diameter of the atom. The ninety-two elemental atoms were found to vary from hydrogen with one charge on the nucleus and one electron, to uranium with ninety-two charges and ninety-two electrons.
The war of 1914-8 dislocated research on radioactivity in all the countries of Europe. During these years Rutherford placed himself at the service of the Admiralty. He did excellent work on hydrophones, which were so essential in the anti-submarine campaign. In 1917 he headed a mission to the United States in order to make that country acquainted as speedily as possible with the recent advances in antisubmarine technique. Rutherford made no money out of his valuable war services.
After the armistice he was able to return to his earlier field of research. In 1919 he conducted one of the most important experiments of his life. By bombardment with the alpha rays of radium, he drove protons out of the nuclei of nitrogen, and in so doing he unwittingly transmuted or transformed nitrogen into oxygen—the first successful attempt by man in the deliberate transformation of matter. He had smashed up the nucleus of an atom. His account of the epochal experiment was merely entitled 'An Anomalous Effect in Nitrogen'.
Towards the end of 1919 Rutherford transferred to Cambridge where he became professor in the Cavendish chair of experimental physics on the resignation of Thomson. This third period was devoted to a continuation of his work in disintegrating the nitrogen atom, extending his experiments to other nuclei. Duties now multiplied around him. In 1921 he was elected professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution. In that year he was able to show photographs indicating the collision of an alpha particle with a proton, surely one of the most remarkable of human achievements. He found moreover that the laws discovered by Newton held good for these minute nuclei of atoms, as did the conservation of energy. For his study of the structure of the nucleus in 1922 he was awarded the Copley medal of the Royal Society, its highest honour.
The later years of Rutherford's life were extremely strenuous. He was president of the Royal Society from 1925-30, and for eight years was chairman of the advisory council of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in Great Britain. It was almost an obsession with him that the future of Great Britain depended on the effective use of science by industry—an obsession which perhaps reveals a trace of Bickerton's influence. He served on many committees and displayed great driving power, a sound grasp of essentials, quick understanding, and natural liveliness. In 1925 he found time to visit Australia and his home country, where he lectured in the principal cities. He was now recognised as an international figure: he lectured in most of the scientific centres of the world and attended many international science conferences; he had friends among the scientists of every country and was trusted and welcomed by them all. Significantly enough, as president of the Academic Assistance Council in 1933-4, he assisted in the humane work of finding positions for German scientists evicted from their universities for political and racial reasons. Countless honours were bestowed upon him from all countries, and in 1931 he was created Baron Rutherford of Nelson, thus becoming the first son of New Zealand to be made a peer.
Despite these many activities he supervised the extensive research carried on in the Cavendish laboratory and continued his own scientific work. In 1930 he drastically revised his early book in an endeavour to bring it up to date with the latest discoveries. In co-operation with Chadwick and Ellis, he published it in a revised form as Radiations from Radioactive Substances. In 1932, an exceptional year for physics, Chadwick at the Cavendish laboratory discovered the neutron, which is like a proton without any electric charge. This discovery had been forecast by Rutherford in 1921. In the same year, 1932, Rutherford himself with two research assistants, Cockroft and Walton, hurled protons with a voltage exceeding 600,000 at lithium, and the lithium split violently into two fragments, each helium. World attention was focused on the work at Cambridge.
On 19 October 1937 Rutherford died suddenly after a brief illness. He was only sixty-six, and his death came as a great blow to the world of science, especially as he was planning a tremendous extension in the experimental work of his Cavendish laboratory with a generous gift of £250,000 from Lord Austin. He had been a hero in what he himself called 'the heroic age of physics'. His son-in-law, Professor Fowler, paid a fitting tribute: 'Ideally equipped for directing a physical laboratory, he was capable at once of intense sustained individual research, of suggesting and inspiring with his own fire cognate researches of others over a very wide field, and, particularly in later years, of organising the teamwork required for elaborate attacks on many modern problems. His genial but dominant personality, his exacting demands for the best, the inspiration of his personal research, and the generosity with which he suggested and directed the work of his staff and students, created an atmosphere in any laboratory he directed which no one who experienced it will forget, or, alas, ever hope to meet again.'
He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
10 Mellor
The Careers of Rutherford and Mellor have a certain similarity. Though they graduated from different colleges, Rutherford from Canterbury, Mellor from Otago, these two leaders in science attended lectures during virtually the same years and carried out their most brilliant work during much the same period at towns far away indeed from their Dominion homes, but as close together as Manchester and the 'Five Towns' of Staffordshire. They died within a few months of each other in London. The status of Rutherford in physics is known to all New Zealanders, but that of Mellor in chemistry is less widely recognised.
Although the boy Mellor was already ten years old when he arrived in New Zealand, all his schooling was obtained here. When he left for England in 1899 at the age of thirty all the formative influences of his life were already behind him and his future greatness seemed assured to his teachers and associates.
Mellor's father, Job, was a loom-turner in the Yorkshire woollen mills and a model of tireless patience. His name was not inappropriate. Not well educated by our modern standards, he was adaptable and a keen reader. He used to make his own clothes and in later years he built his own house in Dunedin. He was a man with strong Liberal and Labour sympathies and pre-eminently fitted for a colonial life. His wife, Emma, also from Yorkshire, was frugal, tidy, and a born home-maker.
Joseph William Mellor was born in Lindley, a suburb of Huddersfield, in 1869. The family arrived in Lyttelton in 1879 and spent two years in Kaiapoi, where the father worked in the woollen mills, and the children went to school. In 1881 they all went south to Dunedin, attracted by the woollen mills in the Kaikorai valley. Here the father built his house, and the family settled down. Joseph went to the Linden school, where he was regarded as an ordinary industrious schoolboy of no outstanding merit. Leaving school in December 1882, he started work as a handy boy in the employ of H. S. Fish, the prominent citizen, mayor, and member of Parliament, whose vituperative speeches were a feature of politics in the nineties.
Joseph then progressed through Simon Brothers' boot shop to McKinley's boot factory, and finally to the boot factory of Sargood and Sons where he worked for some years. Only recently a certain Dunedin citizen, who was Mellor's foreman at Sargood's factory, thought of Mellor only as a quiet, studious boot-clicker, pondering over mysterious books in lunch hours and during every spare minute while the factory drone was still. As Mellor himself confided to his old schoolmate, lifelong friend, and brother-in-law, Mr Arthur Ellis of Dunedin, he was a youth in his early teens when he first conceived his lifelong determination—impossible of fruition as it then appeared—to become the foremost chemist of his time. This determination appears to have owed little to his environment, although his father was always very interested in all matters pertaining to science.
It was a long walk in those mornings over the Roslyn hill to Sargood's factory, and a longer walk back in the evening, but every night was spent at the beloved studies. A laboratory was built in the garden of the home—not a pretentious building, only a six foot by six foot shed of corrugated iron, fitted with such meagre apparatus and books as his modest savings could compass. While the evening meal was in progress, it was his mother's task, or rather labour of love, since the studies of young Joe were already the pride and hope of the parents, to heat a brick in the kitchen oven. Immediately the meal was over the indefatigable student withdrew to the tin shed for the evening, and there experimented and read by the light of a small kerosene lamp, with only a hot brick enclosed in flannel to keep himself warm. It is interesting to learn that the tin shed was still in existence a few years ago, and that much of Mellor's modest apparatus was still housed there. A further proof of the young scientist's industry is revealed by the fact that being too poor to buy the books he needed, he borrowed many of them from various sources and laboriously copied out the contents in longhand.
There was of course little time for sport or other relaxation for one who was wont 'to scorn delights and live laborious days', but at the suggestion of Mr Arthur Ellis, Mellor was introduced to chess in 1885 and soon became an outstanding player. For some years he acted as chess editor of the Dunedin Evening Star and on occasions reached the finals of the New Zealand chess championship. In his maturer years in Staffordshire and London, we learn that the only sport that could delay the completion of his monumental Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry was a game of penny poker or the more erudite solo whist.
Mellor's studies attracted the attention of the late G. M. Thomson, science master at the Otago Boys' High School, and father of Dr Allan Thomson, the first New Zealand Rhodes Scholar. Mellor attended classes at the Technical School of which G. M. was a director, and from there he matriculated in 1892. By this time he had shown aptitude for mathematics also, and Thomson, recognising a coming genius, arranged a bursary or scholarship to the university. He also assisted in the arrangement with Sargood's whereby Mellor was permitted the necessary time off to attend lectures. I well remember the enthusiasm of Mr Thomson after Mellor's fine work, Higher Mathematics for Students of Chemistry and Physics, was published in 1902, and his entreaties to us to watch Mellor—'he's the coming man'. We also must
'touch the Happy Isles,And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.'
At the University Mellor came under the influence of the veteran Professor Black, who was delighted when he recognised after a few years that Mellor had outstripped him in his own field. When the time came for Black to retire, it was suggested by friends in Dunedin that Mellor, then at Owens College, Manchester, should be brought back to succeed him. 'No, no!' the old man protested, 'he would be wasted here.' Certainly English industry would have been deprived of very valuable assistance in a wartime emergency if Mellor had returned to Dunedin.
In 1897 Mellor won the senior scholarship in chemistry from Otago, and in 1898 he gained first-class honours in chemistry, and in 1899 was awarded the 1851 Exhibition science scholarship in chemistry. It is interesting to remember that Rutherford won the senior scholarship in mathematics at Canterbury in 1893 and was awarded the Exhibition science scholarship in electricity in 1894, and that Erskine gained the senior scholarship in physical science in 1893 and was awarded the Exhibition science scholarship in electricity in 1896, also from Canterbury College. Mellor taught at Lincoln Agricultural College for a few months until the benefits of the Exhibition scholarship could be utilised. Before leaving, Mellor, aged thirty, was married to Miss Emma Bakes, a young lady from Lincolnshire who had been brought up in Auckland. His early training completed, his happiness assured, and with brilliant prospects unfolding, Mellor sailed with his wife from Port Chalmers in August 1899, to take up his research scholarship at Owens College, Manchester, under Professor H. B. Dixon.
In 1902 Mellor, now a doctor of science, was appointed chemist to the Pottery Manufacturers' Federation, and proceeded to Newcastle-under-Lyme in the Five Towns where the pottery industry is centralised. This district was then becoming famous through the classic novels of Arnold Bennett, the greatest literary figure to emerge from the busy hills and valleys where the Five Towns cluster. It was here that Mellor was to find his life work. In 1905 he became director of the research laboratories of the Federation, and until 1937 he was engaged in chemical researches associated with the ceramic industry.
During the war years Mellor had, like many another scientist, to adapt himself to the new needs of the nation, and in this he gave striking proof of his greatness. The steel industry was suddenly confronted with a situation that threatened the life of the nation, when continental supplies of refractory materials and of many necessary steel alloys ceased to be available. Mellor offered his services to the authorities, and so prompt and successful were the results of his research that the industry was enabled to meet the stupendous demands of the war almost without intermission or delay. He was able to replace to some extent the German scientists upon whom the steel industry had relied. A well-known English technical magazine declared that although it was, of course, incorrect to claim that any one man such as Foch, Clemenceau, or Lloyd George had won the war, such a claim could most nearly be advanced for Mellor. It is known that he was approached concerning the offer of a peerage; but his innate modesty and the moderate wealth—or poverty—he enjoyed alike prevented his acceptance of the honour. In conversation he explained the reluctance by saying that since his health prevented his 'doing his bit' in the trenches, his scientific labours should be given freely as his contribution to the service of his country.
Before the war Mellor had already planned an important extension of research work in the many branches of the pottery industry. The idea had originated in a conversation between Mellor and Lieutenant-Colonel C. W. Thomas. This was followed by a conference, held at the North Staffordshire Hotel on 4 January 1909, of those interested in refractories. The Institution of Gas Engineers was the first to take advantage of the research facilities of the Pottery Federation, but co-operation gradually increased until on 4 April 1920 the British Refractories Research Association was formally constituted. This Association was directed by four joint committees representing respectively the Pottery Manufacturers' Association, the Institution of Gas Engineers, and the Blast Furnace and Open Hearth sections of the British Iron and Steel Federation. The allied researches were conducted in the laboratories of the Pottery Federation for some years, but on 5 December 1934 magnificent new laboratories were opened at Shelton, Stoke-on-Trent. Mellor was appointed the first director, being as The Engineer observed, 'the only man for the position.' The laboratories were called the Mellor Laboratories of the British Refractories Research Federation, 'in grateful recognition by the Council of Dr Mellor's long and distinguished service to the ceramic industry.' A far cry from the tin shed in Kaikorai valley, with its primitive comforts and facilities! During his later years Mellor was a busy member of the Ceramic Society, holding office most of the time as secretary or president. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1927. He continued in harness at the laboratories till 1937, when continued ill health enforced his retirement. On that occasion there was conferred upon him a c.b.e., a somewhat barren honour for so great a man.
His many activities at the laboratories had not deterred him from completing his magnum opus, a Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic Chemistry, on which he laboured for almost twenty years, the volumes appearing from 1922-37. It was his practice to prepare the work for two stenographers every night from 8 p.m. till 2 a.m., the work being typed next day. This routine was varied only when Mellor was tempted by the occasional family game of cards already mentioned. In sixteen volumes he treated the whole field of inorganic chemistry in such detail that he appears to have exhausted the subject.
After his retirement, he migrated to Highlands Heath, Portsmouth road, London, where he died on 24 May 1938. He had always been a man who had found work its own reward. He had no financial ambitions and had always regarded his knowledge as something that should, as far as possible, be available as a gift to those desiring to benefit from it.
Lest this account convey the impression that Mellor was a chemist and nothing more, I must remark upon his personality and general interests. The deficiencies of his early education Mellor was able to overcome by the continuous study of science and literature. He was forever widening the scope of his knowledge, a process which was made easier for him by the loving care of his wife. She provided the quiet, equable, well-ordered ménage that kept Mellor clear of anxieties and freed him for his omnivorous reading and constant study. Mellor was able to accumulate a fine library, and he found the leisure to make full use of it. On his retirement, after he had disposed of 30,000 volumes, chiefly pamphlets, he still had eight tons of books to transport to London.
His writings are enriched by a wealth of quotation testifying to his thorough acquaintance with English literature, prose and poetry. For example, about twenty years ago he wrote a letter to a nephew in Dunedin, who being confused by Einstein's revolutionary conclusions, had asked his uncle to explain the mystery of curved and expanding space. The answer was written from Stratford-on-Avon, where Mellor was passing the night, and where he could not use his library. This letter contains in order the following quotations or references: (1) three lines from W. M. Praed, (2) two lines from Omar Khayyam, (3) four lines from H. D. Ellis, (4) a quotation in Latin from an unnamed ancient writer, (5) a prose quotation of twenty-six words from E. Johnson, (6) a reference to Lord Wharton's Lilliburlero, (7) three lines from T. Campion, (8) a prose quotation of forty words from Francis Bacon, (9) a prose quotation of forty-two words from Bishop Wilkins, (10) a quotation of forty-five words from Lewis Carroll, (11) a reference to A. Eddington's estimate of the number of the stars, (12) a French quotation from S. Vatriquant, (13) the Latin motto of the Nominalists of the eleventh century, (14) another quotation from E. Johnson, (15) a tag of Mr Richard Swiveller, (16) a line from Tennyson's Tiresias, (17) a rough version of a saying from Oliver Wendell Holmes, (18) one from Jules Verne, (19) a Latin maxim from Tertullian, (20) another quotation from Francis Bacon, (21) a thirty-two word quotation from Eddington, (22) a philosophical statement in French from Leibniz, (23) a twenty-one word quotation from Montaigne, (24) the 'What is Truth' of Pontius Pilate, (25) a musing of Mr Dooley from the Dooley Monologues of F. P. Dunne, and (26) a reference to Weller senior's experience with widows. The letter also contains three amusing cartoons of studies in the fourth dimension. The letter is light, amusing, friendly, and explains clearly where reality ends and theoretical mathematics begin in Einstein's topsyturvy world. Doubtless a few of the quotations were fresh in Mellor's mind, since everybody was talking Einstein at the time, but the great majority were obviously quoted extempore for the benefit of a youthful relative, and the last reason doubtless prompted die placing of the quotations. Mellor himself admits elsewhere that he had 'a good memory as memories go'. Readers must also admit this, with perhaps the qualification that most memories 'don't go that way'.
The influence of his wide reading is evident in all that Mellor wrote. Even in the most technical portions of his mathematical and chemical work his use of language is clear, forcible, and at times eloquent. He well illustrates Huxley's remark: 'Science and Literature are not two things but two sides of one thing.' He was, however, endowed with lighter gifts. His early work showed that the true bent of his genius was mathematical even more than chemical, and like many mathematicians Mellor was a great lover of poetry and a master of whimsy and nonsense. He was a cartoonist of striking ability and a creator of delightful humour and amusing conceits. It was curiously enough as secretary of the Ceramic Society that he let himself go to the fullest extent, and although the seasons of his most carefree jollity were apparently on the occasions when the society held its conventions in foreign places, nevertheless even the ordinary routine proceedings of that dull body are enlivened by sketches and jeux d'esprit from its irrepressible secretary. In 1934 the Ceramic Society itself published an extraordinary volume of light and airy nothings entitled Uncle Joe's Nonsense, a volume of fun in prose, verse, and picture, chosen by Mellor from his store of published nonsense, and from letters to his nephews and nieces in Dunedin and to friends. Here Mellor had much in common with a professor of mathematics, the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), and with a professor of economics, Stephen Leacock. If in future a Queen of England is induced by reading Uncle Joe's Nonsense to send an open order to her bookseller for a complete collection of Mellor's published works, as Queen Victoria did after reading Alice in Wonderland, a similar shock is in store for her!
While glancing at these ebullitions of a playful fancy, we must also remember that Mellor was in the foremost rank of inorganic chemists, that in sixteen volumes he virtually exhausted all that could be authoritatively said up to date on the theory and practice of inorganic chemistry, and that his researches on refractory materials and special steels constituted original work of outstanding importance to Great Britain and to the world.
11 Cockayne
It is natural that New Zealanders should show a more intimate appreciation of those scientists whose work is visibly influenced by New Zealand associations than of those who achieved their successes abroad. In the truest sense they are New Zealand scientists whose work bears the impress of our land and sea, and, more subtly, the impress of our modes of thought. Yet, curiously enough, the three men, Cotton, Guthrie-Smith, and Cockayne, who are par excellence New Zealand scientists in this sense, were born outside the Dominion. Cotton found his inspiration in the diverse contours of the New Zealand landscape. Guthrie-Smith settled on a sheep run north of Napier fifty years ago, studied the changes in plant-growth brought about by European settlement —changes as minute and gradual as those of an hourglass, but quite as inexorable—and in Tutira gave to the world the story of his observations in this new and fascinating branch of ecological botany. Cockayne, the subject of this chapter, coming to New Zealand in search of health, found here a unique field for botanical research.
Leonard Cockayne was born at Norton Lees, a Derbyshire village, on 7 April 1855. He developed a bent for natural history, and after leaving school his desire for scientific learning led him to Owen's College, Manchester. Like Owen, Huxley, and Hector, he found that the only access to university study in science at that time, 1873, was through the medical course. Although a brilliant youth, he did not take kindly to the prescribed courses of study and did not persevere with the degree. Moreover his health broke down, and he left England in 1879, going first to Australia and then on to New Zealand in 1881. Until 1885 he was a teacher at Greytown (now called Allanton) in the Taieri plains. Then, obtaining an income sufficient for his wants, he was able to retire and to devote his life to the study of the native flora of New Zealand. He established a private experimental station on four and a-half acres of sandy soil at New Brighton, near Christchurch, and there he introduced a large number of shrubs and trees and carried out experiments in sand dune reclamation. In his garden he was able to study the seedling development of many New Zealand plants and the variations in form during development that are one of their most striking features. To quote his own words, 'for various reasons the plant life of New Zealand is of peculiar interest, especially its extreme isolation from other land-masses, its flora of diverse origin but with an astonishing number of endemic species and group after group of wild hybrids, the numerous and often peculiar life-forms of its members, its having developed unmolested by grazing and browsing mammals, and its vegetation, so diversified that only a continent extending into the tropics can claim an equality.'
Cockayne studied the plant in all its varied environments with a view to learning how and why the variations in soil, climatic conditions, and association with other nearby plants affected its mode of growth and modified its form. The importance of such study to the problems of plant evolution generally is obvious. For Cockayne was studying the origins of species in plant-life, thus specialising in a section of the Darwinian field.
Realising the wide scope of his subject, Cockayne did not restrict his study in plant variation to New Zealand only, but corresponded with botanists in many parts of the world, exchanging specimens with them. In this way he was able to introduce to Christchurch gardens many valuable species, besides supplying himself with rich material for the comparative study of plant-forms. He devoted his energies to a branch of botany which had so far received scant investigation. As Sir Arthur Hill wrote in the obituary notice published by the Royal Society: 'Unrecognised and unlabelled at first, Cockayne was already an ecologist waiting for the term to be adopted by botanists, and fully trained, with his keen insight, to lead the way not in New Zealand only but in the world.'
A great stimulus to Cockayne's botanical career was the visit to New Zealand in 1898 of von Goebel. Karl Ritter von Goebel was then the acknowledged leader of European botany and a pioneer of the new ecological study. He saw New Zealand's wealth of vegetation under Cockayne's guidance, and he was much impressed by Cockayne's work, particularly his study of plant morphology in the New Brighton garden. The two men became firm friends, and in 1903 von Goebel was instrumental in having the honorary degree of doctor of philosophy conferred on Cockayne by the University of Munich.
Cockayne began his contributions to the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute in 1897, and from then until the time of his death he published a long series of articles and books that have become classics throughout the world. The best known are his New Zealand Plants and Their Story (1910 and 1919), and Vegetation of New Zealand in Die Vegetation der Erde series. Ecology which he studied for forty years is, in his own words, 'the class of research which deals with living plants and their relation to their surroundings and which gathers its data from actual observation in the field.' Cockayne showed how involved was the problem of classification of species, as the reactions of plants to varying conditions of moisture, light, exposure, soil, altitude, and association are extremely complicated and diverse. Classification is frequently very difficult even for the expert, as the following incident shows. While Cockayne was being proudly escorted over the garden of one of his disciples, so the story goes, the owner pointed to a flourishing plant and explained 'That is the Nothofagus fusca.' 'Indeed!' retorted the master with his characteristic snort (with all his innate kindliness he was one who did not suffer fools gladly), 'What bloody fool told you that?' 'You, Doctor; this is one of those plants you sent me last year with labels firmly attached.'
Very early in New Zealand's botanical history the elder Travers had noted the occurrence of natural and wild hybridisation and had reported the fact to Darwin as one of considerable importance to the theory of evolution. Cockayne's study of the reactions of plants to environment especially in the early stages of their growth, and later his intensive study of hybrids, led him to modify Darwin's theory of natural selection. Adaptation to changing environment was not the only factor in the variability of species. Hybridisation was also a factor and a very significant one. With the assistance of his greatest follower, Dr H. H. Allan, Cockayne established the existence of at least 491 groups of natural hybrids in New Zealand, of which six were actually intergeneric crosses, that is, crosses between closely related forms. This extraordinary success in a research extending over thirty years was the result of patient and untiring work in field and garden, and of strenuous journeys in many parts of New Zealand and in outlying groups of islands. Of his lovable qualities as a travelling companion Sir Arthur Hill, the famous English botanist, wrote after an excursion with Dr Cockayne and his son Alfred
Now Director-General of Agriculture.
: 'He was at times a trifle disturbed by a sudden change of plan and had a facility for losing his cap or his bag, but his sense of humour always saved the situation and we had a great time together. No matter whether we were in a crowded train or wedged in the back seat of a motor car, he would discuss abstruse botanical matters or bring forward knotty points as to hybrids, or what was meant by such and such a species. Then his son Alfred would join in with a totally opposite point of view and a fierce altercation, proving quite harmless, would ensue—an outsider might have thought blows would follow!—and all would end happily.'
As a result of the activity of Cockayne and his followers, New Zealand hybrids have probably been studied more thoroughly than those of any other country. Cockayne realised that solutions to problems of plant evolution as exemplified in the New Zealand flora would apply not to this country alone, but mutatis mutandis to the rest of the world. The full extent of his work on botanical nomenclature and classification cannot yet be realised, but his investigations and those of men like von Goebel, de Vries, and Sir Arthur Hill are effecting a revolution in botanical science and a complete revision of the older systems of classification.
Cockayne's work soon earned him a world-wide reputation. As early as 1904 he was requested to write the New Zealand volume for Die Vegetation der Erde, a comprehensive survey of botanical research in all parts of the world. The war delayed the publication of this work until 1921, a second edition appearing in 1928. His volume in this series was regarded by Cockayne as his masterpiece. In it he traced the history of botanical research in New Zealand and treated in great detail the vegetation which covers this country and the islands once connected with it.
Many honours were bestowed upon him. He became an f.l.s. in 1910 and an f.r.s. in 1912. He was a corresponding member of many foreign societies, and had many doctorates conferred upon him. He gained all the available local distinctions, including the first Hector medal in 1912 and the Hutton medal in 1914. He was an original Fellow of the New Zealand Institute and its president in 1918-9. His greatest honour was the Darwin medal of the Royal Society awarded to him in 1928. This, the world's highest honour in biological science, is presented every second year without distinction of race or sex to the most distinguished workers in the Darwinian field. Dr Cockayne's was the twentieth name in this list, the first from the southern hemisphere, and one that brought as much honour to the list as it received. By a happy coincidence Sir Ernest Rutherford was president of the Royal Society the year of Cockayne's award, and it was indeed a proud moment for this country when one of the world's greatest physicists, a New Zealander who had taken his place as a leader in the centre of the scientific world, made the dedicatory speech to honour one of the world's greatest ecologists, a botanist living and working in the same far-off New Zealand.
Cockayne, who was almost totally blind in his last years, died at Wellington on 8 July 1934. He was buried in the Otari Open Air Museum, a botanical reserve established by him near his Ngaio home.
12 Gifford
In 1851 a young clergyman of the Church of England took over the cure of souls in the vast but ill-paid parish of Labrador. He and his wife laboured through the long ice-bound winters and brief summers in the country round and about the Straits of Belle-Isle. Their first child, a daughter, was born there, and with them braved the dangers of the ice-sled and the kayak in their parochial visitings. However, after ten years the gentleman pardonably hungered for the comforts of civilisation, and in 1861 the family set sail via England for the amenities of their new parish, Waitaki. So on Good Friday 1861 on the ship Zealandia, somewhere off the Cape of Good Hope, Algernon Charles Gifford was born. He spent his early years in Oamaru and received his primary education at the Grammar School there. His earliest memories centre round a father, who craved for sunshine, and an old grey horse, on which the father patrolled his large parish.
In 1876 the boy was sent to England to get the benefit of an English education. The first four years be spent at a church school, Denston in Staffordshire, whence he gained a sizarship to St John's College, Cambridge, and there specialised in mathematics, more particularly astronomical mathematics. To this day he does not know whether there were any professors of mathematics at Cambridge. The only tuition he received took the form of a bi-weekly attendance for less than an hour each time at the rooms of his tutor, W. H. Besant, a man who had written text-books, particularly in hydrostatics and mechanics. The audience comprised six men more or less interested in mathematics, one of them being Matthews, already an m.a., who became Senior Wrangler in Gifford's year, and the other five virtually beginners. The tuition consisted in the polite enquiry from the tutor as to whether any difficulties had been encountered in the interim. The consequent queries from the five were absurdly easy to Besant and Matthews, and those from Matthews were as Greek to the five. The rest of the time Gifford read in his rooms. His only relaxation was a weekly game of football, and to his vast astonishment he was awarded his college colours in that sport. Amazement succeeded astonishment in Gifford when he graduated Fourteenth Wrangler in 1880 and won the Herschel Prize for astronomical mathematics. I must, however, warn you that this trite commentary on the advantages of an English education was given me by Gifford himself and that 'Gifford of Wellington' (to give him the title he is accorded in scientific publications and circles) is much of an iconoclast.
In 1883 Waitaki High School was founded, and Gifford became the mathematical master. He was there for six years until in 1889 he was tempted to Christ's College, Christchurch, where he taught for three years. Christ's College had never been prominent in mathematics, until J. K. H. Inglis (now professor of chemistry at Otago) and A. E. Flower raised its status in that subject during Gifford's time there. His period of office, however, terminated in 1892. These years in Christchurch were to prove momentous, since it was there, in 1889, that Gifford came in contact with Bickerton and found his life work in the rationalisation and proof of the theory of partial impact. In 1895, not long after Firth's transfer from Christ's College to the headmastership of Wellington College, Gifford became mathematical master at Wellington, and the long and happy associations of thirty-two years began.
The science of astronomy had its beginnings in the observation of the stars and the charting of their movements. A 'desire to see things as they are and to see them whole' can of course manifest itself in such observations. Such a desire to see things whole is, however, only a beginning. The science of astronomy finds its legitimate heights in the desire to give a rational explanation of the origin, evolution, and future of the visible universe. The complete solution is of course too vast and too ambitious for human enterprise to cope with, but steps in the formation and progress should be within the scope of our finding. The astronomer's job is to make intelligent guesses at the problem and to check the validity of these guesses by mathematical and mechanical considerations.
Certain progress has been made. The Chaldeans, the Egyptians, and the Greeks knew the proper movements of most of the constellations, while Aristarchus determined the relative movements of the solar system. The invention and development of the telescope increased the scope and reliability of such observations, and a chart of the galaxy is not now difficult to construct. Newton, Leibniz, and Laplace gave us the law of gravitation and the processes of the calculi, and these enabled us to define completely the motion of the planets and to learn something of the motion of the stars in general. The spectroscope taught us a great deal concerning the elements of which the stars are composed and gave us valuable information in many cases concerning their temperatures and velocities. The mass and volume of the stars can also be ascertained in many cases. This is the framework on which astronomers must build their theories of the universe.
One of the most striking features of the visible universe is the fact that the mass of stars and nebulae of which it is composed lie almost in one plane, and the same applies to the sun and planets of our solar system. Any theory of the universe must therefore agree with this fact, since the regularity is so marked as to He well beyond the range of chance.
Laplace was the first authority to attempt any solution of the problem, but this theory of the aggregation of rotating nebulae into planets is too diffuse and formless for modem consumption. The Americans, Chamberlin and Moulton, in the early years of this century found the nebular hypothesis untenable. They claimed that the sun, long ago, if not now, was in an eruptive state and constantly ejected huge masses which normally fell back into the parent body. As briefly explained by Gifford in Scientia, September 1932: 'The planets have arisen from dynamic encounter of our sun and another star. This star, passing at a distance, stimulated the sun to eject to great distances portions of its mass, each bolt, as it was thrown off, separating into nuclei and scattered fragments. The passing star then drew these into orbits, until the whole of the scattered material had a concurrent orbital organisation.'
Jeans and Jeffreys upheld what is known as the tidal theory. Jeans believes that the solar system was formed by the slow passing of a huge star within about the sun's diameter of its surface, the sun being then dark and cold and of extremely low density. The gravitational influence of this visitor raised enormous tides and quakings on the primeval sun, and huge masses were torn from its surface. This relieved the pressure below, and a stream of gaseous matter shot out from the sun. This filament condensed into colossal drops and so formed the planets. Jeffreys agrees with Jeans in part, but he shows that the conditions of a slow encounter cannot be realised, and that a transitional one is incapable of producing a solar system. Jeffreys now considers that attention should be paid to the older theory of an actual collision.
None of these theories can satisfactorily account for all the known phenomena in the solar system. Bickerton, however, offered a plausible explanation, so plausible indeed that modern theorists often do not know that their hypotheses were in some sort anticipated by him. Puzzled by the sudden appearance of a nova in the Swan in 1876, he endeavoured to account for this new star which flared to extraordinary brilliance in a few days and faded away almost as quickly. This led him to develop a new theory of the universe.
It was on 4 July 1878, a date that must become historical in the world of science, that Bickerton read before the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury his paper 'On Temporary and Variable Stars' in which the main facts of the theory of partial impact were first announced. This was followed by seven other papers before the end of 1880, and in these were revealed all the brilliant guesses that it has been the life work of Gifford to systematise and prove. The salient points of this theory are roughly as follows:
Collisions between stellar bodies are probable from their motion alone.This probability is greatly increased when their motions are varied by their mutual gravitational attraction.Virtually every collision of this kind between bodies whose masses are not greatly dissimilar must take the form of a glancing blow.In such cases of partial impact a portion is sheared off each of the impacting masses to form a third body.This third body is immediately raised to an enormous temperature by the work done in the collision.Such partial impacts with the formation of a third body tend to favour the collection of all stellar bodies into one plane.This theory of partial impact agrees with all the observed astronomical facts attending the birth of novae and explains the origin of temporary, variable, and double stars. As elaborated by modern theorists, it forms the basis of an explanation of the origin of all planetary systems including the solar system.This theory, with the alternate conversions of heat and kinetic energy and the alternate aggregation and breaking up of huge bodies, is the only one that pictures a universe with rhythmic recurring cycles of like conditions. The forbidding spectacle of a dead universe, consisting of a uniform mass of cold and stationary particles, that is so repugnant to the scientific mind, has no place in the implications of the theory of partial impact.
This is a summary of the theory put forward in the rambling, discursive and self-repeating papers and books of Professor Bickerton. The Romance of the Earth (1900), The Romance of the Heavens (1901), The Birth of Worlds and Systems (1911) were among his publications, the last two dealing with his favourite topic. Anyone conversant with the science of mechanics will see that a tremendous amount of mathematical investigation is necessary before any of his statements can be accepted as proved. It was here that Bickerton failed, for he was a poor mathematician with little faculty for exact arithmetic. His mistakes in the simplest problems of addition or subtraction were the standing joke of the back row in his classes. The professor, however, had an extraordinary faculty for a mental graphic arithmetic of his own. After looking at a long collection of complicated figures on the board, Bickerton would close his eyes for a few seconds and then dreamily announce that the final answer was about 430,000. No one in the class could tell offhand whether the answer would be closer to 0 or 40,000,000, but excited calculators would soon whisper some such figure as 437,618 round the amazed audience. This faculty was inadequate however to win for the theory of partial impact acceptance in a cold world of science. Gifford, with his flair for astronomical mathematics and his enormous industry and patience, was the man for this work.
For fifty years he has devoted all the time he could spare from his teaching and his family life to solitary thought and calculation. He has endeavoured to develop and prove points put forward by Bickerton, and to put the latter's theories into mathematical form. From Bickerton's speculations on whirling coalescence, the possibilities of which he himself did not appear to realise, Gifford has derived a theory of the origin of the solar system. Stars are only bright suns for so many million years after an encounter. Gifford explains the origin of the solar system by the almost complete collision of two suns, one of which is denser than the other. 'During the encounter,' says Gifford in Scientia, January 1938, 'the stars endeavour to change places, with the result that the greater part of both is whirled into a single mass, the axis of which is at rest, whilst the speed of rotation of the remainder increases outwards. The outer tides, and all the matter not involved in the clash, pass on, leaving the scene of the encounter in orbits of rather high eccentricity which all lie close to the plane of mutual approach. . . . Large masses with comparatively high speeds are flung from the lighter star, denser and smaller ones with lower speeds leave the heavier one. All, as they roll along the surface before breaking away acquire a new rotation which is combined with any that each mass previously possessed. The central mass, heated to a high temperature by the collision, is soon surrounded by a vast whirling atmosphere, through which the nuclei of the future planets, and all the other fragments, have to plough their way. . . . Collisions, especially numerous at first, must occur between masses on the outward journey and others then returning. Each collision reduces the radial motion without affecting that at right angles to it. The eccentricity of the orbits is thus reduced. The nebulous atmosphere around the newly-formed sun also plays its part, especially near perihelion.' The swirl tends to throw the fragments into one plane, but the original rotations of the two suns before collision upset this slightly so that the planets do not move in quite the same plane.
To Gifford encounter is the life principle of the universe. It explains why all the stars we know appear to rotate. Gifford cannot accept the forlorn view of Jeans, who says, 'We believe that the Universe is not a permanent structure. It is living its life, and travelling the road from birth to death just as we are. For science knows no change except the change of growing older, and no progress except progress to the grave.' Like Bickerton, Gifford believes in the immortality of the stars. 'The more the heavens are studied,' he says, 'the more clearly does it appear that stars are revivified by stellar encounters, and that even such vast systems as the spiral nebulae are reformed and given new life by colliding with one another.' He concludes his article on The Immortality of the Universe thus: 'Viewed in this way we see in Nature no imperfection and no seed of decay. The present appears no longer as a passing stage in a slow march towards death, but as a glorious scene in the cycle of the eternal heavens.'
Gifford's latest publication in the Journal of Science and Technology is an attack on the tidal theory. He shows that suns like our own, approaching each other, would draw no tidal forces until they were very close together. Under the most favourable circumstances, there would be no more than eighteen minutes in which the tidal forces could work, and this would be insufficient to set in motion a solar system. Although Jeans still holds to the tidal theory, Jeffreys is now adopting that of grazing impact.
Another theory of which Gifford is an outstanding exponent, is the meteoric theory of the origins of the surface features of the moon. The earth and moon, he considers, were separated from the sun at almost the same time. The earth however was still molten when both earth and moon were bombarded by meteorites. These meteorites therefore left no permanent imprint on the earth, but exploded violently on the cooler crust of the moon, raising the ringed crater formations which cover its surface. Gifford does not accept the more orthodox volcanic explanation of the moon's craters.
Gifford has published in many papers, including such New Zealand publications as the Hector Observatoryhector Bulletins, the New Zealand Astronomical SocietyBulletins, the Journal of Science and Technology, besides the international Scientia and the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. He has read innumerable papers and delivered countless lectures, including the lecture for the Donovan Trustees of Australia, in 1934. Gifford invariably supports his theories by involved mathematical data, and every calculation is expressed graphically and numerically. He corresponds with the leading astronomers of the English-speaking world. He would consider his life fulfilled if he could gain general credence for the remarkable guesses made by Bickerton in this little country sixty years ago.
In his own field of stellar physics Gifford is the most alert and searching mind of the day, and that field is the highest branch of science. Some may enquire into the collisions of the electrons and the atoms, others into the occurrence of wild hybrids in our forests, still others into the ceaseless sculpture of the apparently eternal mountains by ice, wind, and rain; but surely it can be affirmed that the investigation of 'The Genesis of Worlds and Systems' (to quote the title of Bickerton's address in 1879) offers, in the words of Tyndall, 'a field for the noblest exercise of what, in contrast with the knowing faculties, may be called the creative faculties of man'.
13 Cotton
The early professors ably performed a much needed service in teaching science to young New Zealand, and they had their reward in the numerous scientists produced by the New Zealand university colleges. Now that science is more liberally endowed, the later professors can specialise in one branch of science, and they find that they have a little more time for their own pursuits than their predecessors could spare from the classroom. They manage, often with considerable difficulty, to make time for original research, so that the fostering of the careers of other people does not necessarily entail the sacrifice of their own. One who is an excellent teacher and who has also made a name for himself as a gifted geomorphologist is Professor C. A. Cotton.
Geomorphology — the study of changing land- forms—has only recently developed as a subject separated from geology, which itself has only been considered a pure science at a comparatively late date. Before Cotton's contributions to the new science are considered, it is relevant to trace briefly the history of geology up to the early years of this century. The period from 1790-1820 has been labelled by Zittel as the 'heroic age of geology', for it was then that a systematic observation of rock structure began. The term 'geology' was first suggested by Deluc and was used in a broad sense. Werner was more precise and insisted on the term 'geognosy' for that portion of science dealing with the identification of rocks and minerals and their stratigraphic relationship, and he restricted the term 'geology' to the science dealing with the origin and history of organic creation. The two branches of science overlap considerably, but the distinction is a useful one.
William Smith
The centenary of the death of William Smith fell on 28 August 1939. A fine appreciation of his life and work appeared in Engineering, 25 August. It is interesting to learn that he was awarded by the Geological Society in 1831 the first Wollaston medal.
, an engineer, was the 'father of British geology'. His experience in constructing canals convinced him that the relative ages of the various strata could be determined by an examination of the fossils contained in them. He helped to lay the foundations of a new science, palæontology, and then began the long enquiry into the history of the lithosphere, or in more familiar words, the earth's crust.
Cuvier then advanced an alarming theory of the earth's history. He had followed close upon Smith in the discovery of the important deductions that could be drawn from palæontology, but he was impressed by the 'disproportion between the infinitesimal changes now taking place under the eye of man, and the magnitude of the topographical and biological changes evinced in the remote past.' 'Changes of such magnitude,' said Cuvier, 'must have been the result of stupendous revolutions whose cause and effects were different both in kind and degree from any known phenomena of the present age.' His theory was known as the 'Catastrophal Theory' for obvious reasons.
Geologists, repelled by the idea of a succession of giant calamities, now attempted to prove that there existed some order and decency in the behaviour of the earth. Sir Charles Lyell was the ablest protagonist of the 'order and decency' theory. In four tremendous volumes he sought to demonstrate that all the former changes of the earth's surface are referable to causes now in operation. The first volume dealt with the influences of climate and climatic variations, the second treated of the agencies of denudation and erosion, the third told the story of the coral reef, while the fourth was devoted to bringing historical geology up to date and was published independently as Elements of Geology. This established his fame.
In the nineties geologists, headed by Davis in America and by Penck in Europe, demonstrated fully, for the first time, the extraordinary manner in which the surface of the earth is still being modified by the subtle but ceaseless influences of wind, water, and ice. Their work, and its extensions to past times and buried strata, really gave birth to the new science of geomorphology. To this new science, two New Zealanders, Dr Cotton and Dr J. A. Thomson, were to make valuable contributions.
Charles Andrew Cotton, the son of a sea captain, was born and spent his first years at sea, and it has been suggested that this accounts for his later interest in the more slowly changing landshapes. He was educated at the Christchurch Boys' High School, whence he won a junior university scholarship in 1903. Cotton had one difficulty—mathematics—which he was unable to overcome in spite of the efforts of a diligent and capable mathematics master, Mr W. Walton. He went on to study geology under Marshall at the University of Otago, where he won a senior scholarship and graduated with first-class honours in geology. He was appointed lecturer and then professor of geology at Victoria University College, a post which he still holds.
Cotton found his inspiration in the remarkably diverse outlines of the New Zealand landshapes. Here ancient rock formations were uplifted from the sea in recent geological time, and have since been and are being subjected to the wearing influences of ice, weather, and volcanic action to an extent unsurpassed elsewhere. The result is that the New Zealand land and sea-scape is a veritable museum of geomorpho- logical processes, since all the varied influences that alter the earth's crust are carrying on their work continually about us in comparatively accessible regions. The study and classification of these is Cotton's life work.
Cotton's early work was very much influenced by his great friend, Dr J. A. Thomson, who like himself had gained a senior scholarship and first-class honours in geology at Otago. Thomson, New Zealand's first Rhodes Scholar, was a very brilliant student, who on his return from a post-graduate course at Oxford, had been appointed palæontologist to the Geological Survey Department (1911-14) and later director of the Dominion Museum (1914-28). Cotton was a younger and perhaps less brilliant man, but a sound and pertinacious thinker. Both men had leisure to devote to geological studies, and each formed a sincere respect for the other's ability and enthusiasm. Thomson's experience at Oxford had convinced him that New Zealand held a very high, if not a leading place in the science of geology. Both men were determined that the names of Thomson and Cotton should eventually be written on the scroll of illustrious geologists, if talent and hard work brought the reward they merited. Both no doubt had the refutation of Cuvier's damnable theory in mind; but, be that as it may, the unwritten pact was made that Thomson should confound him by palæontology, while Cotton, piling Pelion on Ossa, would bury him deep in geomorphology. Thomson found a fertile field for study, as the conditions under which the Tertiary rocks in New Zealand had been deposited were singularly favourable to the growth of brachiopods. He did great work among Tertiary fossils and increased the number of known species from a mere half dozen or so to over a hundred. Just as he was establishing a reputation beyond these narrow confines, he succumbed to his old enemy tuberculosis. The world is poorer for his untimely death.
Cotton, however, honoured the pact and achieved his ambition. Numerous scientific papers embodied the results of his researches and speculations, and in 1922 the New Zealand Board of Science and Art arranged for the printing of his Geomorphology of New Zealand, Part I—Systematic, which is now a text-book throughout the English-speaking geological world.
This book comprises the first complete systematic treatment of the young science of geomorphology. It describes in a straightforward logical fashion the influences of heat and cold, rain, running water, ice, wind, volcanic action, and the sea upon the land surface of the globe; for although each term used is illustrated by photographs of typical examples of the action referred to taken from New Zealand surroundings, the work is world-wide in its conception, definition, and treatment. The book supplied a framework for the study and teaching of geomorphology that was hitherto lacking. Many of the 'term concepts' had been used previously by William Morris Davis, the great American scientist, but they are fully defined and delimited here, certainly for the first time in the English language. The book standardises the phraseology of the study of geomorphology, and so ranks as a classic that will enable scientists to express their speculations and conclusions in simple phrases which will be understood in all countries. Like Linnaeus in botany and Cuvier in biology, Cotton has given the new science a system of classification that will standardise research everywhere.
Cotton writes an English prose style well adapted to his subject matter. He has no ponderous involved sentences, and very little ornamentation. His is one of the few geological text-books which is not sprinkled with the phrase, 'a hundred million years'. His aim is clarity, and therefore short, incisive sentences are used throughout. He treats all natural phenomena, including earthquakes, in a measured scientific manner. The following is a fair sample of his style:
'The Cycle of Erosion.—In the study of land-forms it is convenient to picture the complete series of forms developed during the process of wearing-down of the land by erosion, as land-surfaces representing practically every stage occur. The period occupied by the whole series of changes in relief produced by erosion, following the uplift of a surface of any form above sea-level is called a cycle of erosion or geographical cycle.The surface upon which eroding agents begin to work is termed the initial surface; its relief is the initial relief The surface of faint relief resulting from the prolonged action of normal erosion on a land surface without interruption by uplift is termed a peneplain. . . .
'A cycle is introduced by the uplift, relative to sea level, of a portion of the lithosphere. It simplifies the elementary study of land-forms to regard this uplift as rapid. It is not to be regarded as ever sudden, or catastrophic, but it may take place so rapidly that the amount of erosion that goes on during uplift is negligible as compared with that which follows completion of the uplift. All uplifts are not as rapid as this, but the results produced by erosion will ultimately be very much the same whether the uplift is slow or rapid.'
It will be observed that though the name of Cuvier is never mentioned in polite geological circles, no opportunity is lost to rebuke him by implication.
Cotton's magnum opus is illustrated by an extraordinary range of photographs, many of them taken by himself. Where photographs would not show sufficient detail, he has supplemented them by many clear and spirited sketches. His sole concern is the clear exposition of his subject. He therefore does not dissipate his energies in attacks on his fellow geologists, who are notoriously a quarrelsome race. He is in private life one of the kindest and most sympathetic of men and never allows an unkind word to escape him, even in geological controversy.
The author's intention was to follow up his statement of the elements of geomorphology by Part II—The Regional Geomorphology of New Zealand. The work is well in hand, but under present conditions the prospects of its being published appear remote. There would naturally be little demand for such a work outside New Zealand. The editions of Part I have sold out — largely to supply the American demand—and the book is now out of print. Professor Cotton has an enlarged and revised version now complete, and it is to be hoped that this will soon be published.
Professor Cotton's work is of vital importance to-day to a young country which has in a hundred years lost so much virgin forest that erosion is already becoming an acute problem. If through his writings and lectures he can aid in the task of convincing New Zealanders of the inevitable and ruinous consequences of deforestation, if he can acquaint them with the general principles of land change, we may be able to look to our natural resources while there is yet time.
14 Conclusion
That two small islands in the South Pacific should, in one hundred years, have contributed so much to science is a fact transcending the limits of mere chance. Some of the reasons for New Zealand's achievement have been stated in the preceding pages; others have been implied. The purpose of this brief epigraph is by recapitulation to summarise these reasons and so to indicate the probable future of science in a country where its foundations have been so well laid.
In the early years of its history science in New Zealand owed much to its natural advantages. Here, before the eager gaze of nineteenth-century science, lay a field of study absorbing in its interest. In area it was small when compared with the great continental masses, but for that reason its secrets were the more accessible. And within its confines were features both varied and unique. Stretching through more than a thousand miles and subjected to the influences of ocean currents and winds, the islands ranged from the north, with its semi-tropical fern and forest, to bleak outposts exposed to Antarctic storms. In relief they descended from relentlessly carved peaks and volcanic mountains to calmer foothills and plains. For aeons the land had lain in splendid isolation. No beasts of prey terrorised its fastnesses: the tuatara slept the centuries away; the wings of birds withered through disuse; the only dangerous creature, a poisonous spider, carried a red marking on its back as a warning of danger. Buttercups, daisies, lilies, and speedwells grew to giant proportions; the forget-me-not developed leaves as large as rhubarb; mosses grew more than a foot high; and full-grown pine-trees cowered beneath these mosses.
As the era of modern science began and communications expanded, men came to explore this fascinating terrain, scientists eager to test new theories in a land little disturbed by the ravages of man or centuries of grazing and agriculture. Their reports, based on personal observations or the accounts of missionaries and settlers, attracted further scientific recruits who came not to visit but to stay. Thus from the beginning the natural history of New Zealand was recorded in a systematic manner and, as the years progressed, a tradition was gradually built up by a distinguished group of scientists and their followers.
The next phase saw the establishment of a university where science and mathematics were placed on an equal footing with classics under men pre-eminent both as scholars and as teachers. It is, of course, possible to argue that the struggle of the Otago pioneers was a mistaken one and that New Zealand would have been better served by the establishment of a purely classical university. New Zealanders, as a people, do not think so, and indeed it is difficult to picture Auckland, for instance, as a 'home of lost causes and impossible beliefs'. However that may be, the decision was made in favour of a university as much scientific as 'humane', and this survey will have made it clear that the University of New Zealand and its constituent colleges have been of paramount importance in our later scientific achievements.
Three factors have thus emerged which have shaped the growth of science in New Zealand: first, its advantages as a field for the study of natural history; second, the force of a tradition founded by men of the highest calibre; third, a system of education which provides admirable facilities for scientific study and training. These factors still operate to-day and will condition the future development of New Zealand science. Though the field has already been mapped, the sources of study for the natural historian, both the amateur and the trained specialist, remain inexhaustible. With the passing of the years, moreover, the country's scientific tradition has been widened and deepened by the contributions of New Zealanders to every branch of study.
But of even greater moment than New Zealand's natural advantages and the strength of its scientific tradition is a system of education highly favourable to the growth of science. The primary and secondary school systems are democratic in the extreme, and a practical bias encourages the clever youth to take up the study of mathematics and science. Rutherford and Mellor, for example, were the sons of parents in poor circumstances; they required financial assistance to pursue their studies; and they were forced to seek immediate financial results on the completion of their education. In a country dominated by older ideals of education, the conditions of scholarships and the requirements of the teaching profession might have forced them to follow a classical or literary course.
In such circumstances, it is true, the men themselves might have gained, but science would definitely have lost. The significant fact is, however, that a tendency noticeable in the nineties has gathered strength in the succeeding half-century, and is to-day particularly noticeable at the apex of the educational system, the University of New Zealand.
Particularly in those subjects favoured by the New Zealand environment—geology, botany, and biology—the four colleges are worthily maintaining the standards set in the early years of their history. Otago, always a centre of geological teaching and research, has been fortunate since 1917 in having as its professor of geology so distinguished an authority as Dr W. N. Benson, whose work has brought him deserved fame in geological centres abroad. The professor of mining and economic geology, until his retirement in 1931, was the veteran James Park, whose long and varied career goes back to the days when he served as a field geologist under Hector. At Canterbury for many years Professor Robert Speight, like Haast before him, held dual office as curator of the Canterbury Museum and lecturer (later professor) of geology, while at Auckland Professor J. A. Bartrum, a New Zealander born and educated, has occupied the chair of geology since 1927. These men have not only been scholars and research workers but they have been continuously employed in the teaching and training of successive generations of students. Indeed the demand for geologists trained in New Zealand is so insistent that it is difficult to keep students in the colleges until their course is completed. Although there has never been a separate chair of botany in this country, the school of New Zealand botanists is held in high esteem. To single out individuals is somewhat invidious, but mention must be made of the Rev. Dr J. E. Holloway of Otago, whose patient work in this field was recognised by his election as F.R.S. in 1937 and by awards in New Zealand and elsewhere. In the study of biology, now highly specialised, the name of Sir William Benham, F.R.S., until recently professor of that subject at the University of Otago, will sufficiently proclaim the fact that Hutton has had worthy successors. Even so cursory a glance as this through the list of teachers of science in the colleges of the University of New Zealand is enough to show that students of science will in the future, as in the past, receive a thorough and stimulating training under the guidance of able men in each field.
New Zealand has great natural advantages; its scientific tradition has been enriched by the contributions of a line of eminent men; and science is firmly established in its educational system. Who can doubt that in its second century this country will continue that scientific work which has been not the least of its contributions to a hundred years of varied history?
A Note on Sources
1 The Forerunners
For original material on the history of science in early New Zealand the reader must consult rare books and manuscripts in special New Zealand collections. The most accessible account of the scientific work of Cook's first voyage is Sir J. D. Hooker's edition of the Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks . . . during Captain Cook's First Voyage. . . . (London, 1896). Banks has suffered much from prudish editing, and it is fortunate that a manuscript copy of the original journal is in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. The admirable engravings of the botanical work of the expedition are to be found in Illustrations of the Botany of Captain Cook's Voyage Round the World in H.M.S. Endeavour in 1768-71 (London, 1900-5) by Sir Joseph Banks and Dr Daniel Solander. The official narratives of the three voyages contain much scientific material and many fine engravings, and they are usefully and sometimes entertainingly supplemented by such works as Dr J. R. Forster's Observations made during a Voyage round the World, on Physical Geography, Natural History, and Ethic Philosophy. . . .(London, 1778). Only twelve arid pages in Vol. i of Captain George Vancouver's A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and round the World. . . . (London, 1798) are devoted to New Zealand, and the expedition's chief scientific contribution, New Zealand Cryptogamia, by Dr Archibald Menzies, was reproduced in W. J. Hooker's Musci Exotici (London, 1818-20) and Icones Filicum (London, 1829-31). The work of Dumont d'Urville's two expeditions was published magnificently in the Voyage de la Corvette l'Astrolabe. . . . (Paris, 1830-3) and Voyage au Pol Sud et dans l'Océanie sur les corvettes l'Astrolabe et la Zélée. . . . (Paris, 1841-3). In the former the botanical observations of Lesson and Richard are fully recorded, while thirteen volumes of the second work are devoted to science, small sections specifically to New Zealand science. It is regrettable that so little of this valuable material has been translated. The results of Allan Cunningham's explorations and those of his brother were published under the title, Florae Insularum Novae Zelandiae Precursor, serially in the Companion to the Botanical Magazine (London, 1836) and later in the Annals of Natural History (London, 1838-40). The best account of Darwin's fleeting visit to New Zealand is to be found in Charles Darwin's Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (Cambridge, 1933), edited by Nora Barlow. This supersedes earlier and less complete versions of the diary. The scientific work of the United States Exploring Expedition is contained in several splendidly produced volumes, of which J. D. Dana's on Zoophytes (Philadelphia, 1848), Geology (Philadelphia, 1849), and Crustacea (Philadelphia, 1852) are of greatest interest to New Zealanders. The space given to New Zealand is limited, but Dana endeavoured to place it in the geological system of the Pacific. The working conditions of the scientist in early New Zealand are nowhere more ably described than in Dr Ernst Dieffenbach's Travels in New Zealand (London, 1843), a book as notable for its scientific value as for its humane outlook. Some reports of the Acheron survey were published in the New Zealand Journal (London, 1840-52), but the scientific work of the expedition was not comprehensively recorded. M. E. Raoul's contributions to New Zealand botany were published in two volumes, Choix de Plantes de la Nouvelle-Zélande (Paris, 1846) and Fleurs Sauvages et Bois Précieux de la Nouvelle-Zélande (London and Paris, 1889), the latter compiled in collaboration with Madame Charles Hetley. The volumes are published and illustrated on the lavish scale common to French scientific works on New Zealand.
2 The Pioneers
Sir J. D. Hooker's successive works on New Zealand flora were the elaborate Flora Antarctica (London, 1844), Flora Novae-Zelandiae (London, 1853) and the monumental Handbook of the New Zealand Flora (London, 1864- 7) which remained the standard reference work until it was superseded by T. F. Cheeseman's similarly planned Manual of the New Zealand Flora (Wellington, 1906). Biographical details will be found in Leonard Huxley's disjointed but interesting Life and Letters of Sir J. D.Hooker (London, 1918). Dr Ferdinand von Hochstetter's principal work was Neu-Seeland (Stuttgart, 1863) which was later translated and published in a revised form as New Zealand its Physical Geography, Geology and Natural History. . . . (Stuttgart, 1867). The full account of the Novara expedition, Reise der Oesterreichiscen Fregatte Novara um die Erde (Vienna, 1861-74) has never been completely translated, but a portion, Dr Karl Scherzer's Narrative of the Circumnavigation of the Globe by the Austrian Frigate Novara (London, 1861-3), devotes Vol. iii, pp. 93- 194, to lively observations on New Zealand. Of the Rev. William Colenso's writings over a long period a few may be selected as indicating the wide range of his interests: Excursions in the North Island of New Zealand (Launceston, 1844), Classification and Description of some New Zealand Ferns (Launceston, 1845), Botany of the North Island of New Zealand (Dunedin, 1865), and the essay On the Maori Races of New Zealand reprinted in Vol. i of the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute (Wellington, 1868).
3 Haast, Hector, and Hutton
Sir Julius von Haast was an able and prolific writer and left a very full record of his activities as explorer and scientist. For the general reader the most interesting of his publications are Topographical and Geological Exploration in Nelson Province (Nelson, 1861) and the classic Geology of the Provinces of Canterbury and Westland (Christchurch, 1879). Sir James Hector was also a prolific writer. His Geological Expedition to the West Coast of Otago, NewZealand, published in the Otago Provincial Government Gazette of 5 November 1863, has a general interest which some of his later publications lack, although his purely scientific books, such as Outline of New Zealand Geology (Wellington, 1886), are written in simple, fluent English. Hutton's chief work as an explorer scientist is contained in Report on the Geology and Goldfelds of Otago (Dunedin, 1875), written with G. H. F. Ulrich. Later he specialised in reference books, among them Catalogue of the Birds of New Zealand, with Diagnoses of the Species (Wellington, 1871), Fishes of New Zealand (Wellington, 1872), written in collaboration with Hector, the Manual of the New Zealand Mollusca (Wellington, 1880), and the Index Faunae Novae Zealandiae (London, 1904). The philosopher and the man are most clearly revealed in his essay on Darwinism (Christchurch, 1887) and, above all, in The Lesson of Evolution (2nd ed., London, 1907), a charming and thoughtful book.
4 Later Scientists
The works of individual scientists are so numerous in the more recent period of New Zealand science, that only a brief selection is here possible. Rutherford's own publications are extremely technical, and their greatness can be appreciated only by the trained physicist. They include Radioactivity (Cambridge, 1904), Radioactive Substances and their Radiations (Cambridge, 1913), later revised with the co-operation of J. Chadwick and C. D. Ellis and published as Radiations from Radioactive Substances (Cambridge, 1930), and a lecture, The Newer Alchemy (Cambridge, 1937). There is an excellent biography, Rutherford (Cambridge, 1939), by A. S. Eve, himself a professor of physics at McGill University, and a more popular but inferior book, Man of Power (London, 1939), by Ivor B. N. Evans. Mellor's principal work is A Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry (London, 1922-37), a vast and exhaustive work. The lighter side of his nature and his facility as a draughtsman are shown in the delightful humorous reminiscences, Uncle Joe's Nonsense (London, 1934). Cockayne's books on New Zealand botany are well written and illustrated with fine photographs. New Zealand Plants and their Story (2nd ed., Wellington, 1919), Vegetation of New Zealand (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1928), and the Trees of New Zealand (Wellington, 1928), written with E. Phillips Turner, are classics in their subjects. The cosmic theories of Bickerton and their substantiation by Gifford have been widely published in books and scientific periodicals. The most lucid exposition of his theory may be found in Bickerton's The Genesis of Worlds and Systems (Christchurch, 1879), The Romance of the Heavens (London, 1901), The Evidence and Scope of the Theory of Impact (Christchurch, 1905), and The Birth of Worlds and Systems (London, 1911). Gifford's work is found in many scientific publications, including Scientia (Milan, 1919-), January 1927, April 1930, April 1931, September-October 1932, October-November 1934, January 1938, The New Zealand Journal of Science and Technology (Wellington, 1918-), and Southern Stars (Wellington, 1934-). Cotton's main work is the invaluable Geomorphology of New Zealand, Part I: Systematic (Wellington, 1922), but he is also the author of many scientific papers.
5 Scientific Periodicals
For the period from the late sixties to the present day the most valuable source is the bound volumes of Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute (Wellington, 1868-1934) and Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand (1935-). The Transactions include articles on almost every branch of science and therefore provide a unique record of scientific work in New Zealand during the last seventy years. Earlier volumes were more general in character, but since the nineties there has been a marked tendency for the publication to become highly technical. Since the foundation of the Polynesian Society and the publication of its quarterly Journal (Wellington, 1892-), articles on anthropology have rarely appeared in the Transactions. The New Zealand Journal of Science was an ambitious but useful periodical, published in Dunedin at two-monthly intervals and edited by G. M. Thomson. Three bound volumes appeared, Vol. i, 1882-3, ii, 1884-5, and Vol. i of a new series, 1891. Vol. ii contains brief biographies of von Haast, Hochstetter, Hutton, and Hooker. Of more recent scientific periodicals mention may be made of The New Zealand Journal of Science and Technology (Wellington, 1918-), published by the New Zealand Board of Science and Art, the New Zealand Journal of Agriculture (Wellington, 1910-), the organ of the Department of Agriculture, and Southern Stars (Wellington, 1934-), published by the New Zealand Astronomical Society.
IndexAcheron, H.M.S., 16, 155Aitken, Alexander Craig, 3Allan, Harry Howard, 121Anderson, William, 10Astronomy in N.Z., Gifford and, 2, 4, 19, 131, 133–6, 158–9; Bickerton and, 19, 88, 130–3, 158Atomic theory, 95–102Banks, Sir Joseph, 9–10; his Illustrations,10, 153; his Journal,153Bartrum, John Arthur, 150Beagle, H.M.S., 11, 154Bccquerel, Antoine Henri, 96, 98Benham, Sir William, 150Benson, William Noel, 149–50Best, Elsdon, 2Bickerton, Alexander William, and partial impact, 19, 88, 127, 130–6; at Canterbury College, 87–9; Rutherford and, 94, 101; publications of, 130, 132, 158Biology, in university colleges, 34, 61, 149–51passimBirth of Worlds and Systems, by Bickerton, 132, 158Black, James Gow, 84–7; Mellor and, 108Botany, N.Z., contributions to, by Cockayne, 2, 117–24, 158; Guthrie-Smith, 3, 117; Banks, 9–10; Solander, 9–10; Menzies, 10, 154; W. J. Hooker, 10–11, 154; Cunninghams, 11, 25, 154; Lyall, 16; Raoul, 16, 25, 155; Sinclair, 20–1, 25, 39; J. D. Hooker, 24–6, 32, 153, 155, 159; Colenso, 24–5, 31–2, 156; Buchanan, 25, 35; Monro, 25; Cheeseman, 26, 155; T. Kirk, 33; university colleges, 149–51Brunner, Thomas, 38Buchanan, John, 25, 35Buck, Peter Henry, 2Buller, Sir Walter, 33Burns, Thomas, 75Busby, James, 11Canterbury University College, foundation of, 76, 83Catalogue of the Birds of New Zealand, by Hutton, 65, 157Catalogue of the Marine Mollusca of New Zealand, by Hutton, 65Cavendish laboratory, 95, 97–9, 100–3Chamberlin, T. C., 129Cheeseman, Thomas Frederic, 26, 155Chemistry, contributions to, by Mellor, 2, 104, 107–12, 116; Skey, 33, 35; Maclaurin, 33, 95; Black, 84–7, 108; Bickerton, 88; Rutherford, 94–5Choix de Plantes de la Nouvelle-Zélande, by Raoul, 16, 155Cockayne, Alfred, 122Cockayne, Leonard, 8, 26, 92; career of, 118–24passim; as ecologist, 118–22; publications of, 120, 158Colenso, William, and Hooker, 24–5; as botanist, 31–2; publications of, 32, 156Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry, by Mellor, 107, 112, 158Cook, Charles, career of, 88–91; Rutherford and, 89, 94Cook, James, 9–10Cotton, Charles Andrew, 2, 68, 91, 117; career of, 137–45passim; publications of, 142–5, 159Cox, S. Herbert, 34Crawford, James Coutts, 33Cunningham, Allan and Richard, 11, 25, 154Curie, Marie, 96Curie, Pierre, 96, 98Cuvier, Georges, 5, 18; catastrophal theory of, 138–9, 141, 144; as biologist, 143Dana, James Dwight, 30–1; publications of, 154–5Darwin, Charles, 45; visits N.Z., 11–12; Hutton and, 60–3, 67–8, 157; Travers and, 121; his Beagle diary, 154Darwinism, by Hutton, 157Darwinism and Lamarckism, by Hutton, 67Davis, E. H., 34Davis, William Morris, 139–40, 143 Dieffenbach, Ernst, 12–15, 25, 27; publications of, 12, 155Dobson, Arthur Dudley, 40Drury, Byron, 29Dumont d'Urville, J. S. C., 11, 25, 154Einstein, Albert, 4, 113–4Erskine, John Angus, 109Evidence and Scope of the Theory of Impact, by Bickerton, 158Exhibitions—
Colonial and Indian (1886), 46, 56Dunedin (1865), 55Melbourne (1880), 56Paris (1867), 42Sydney (1879), 56Firth, Raymond, 2Fishes of New Zealand,65, 157Fleurs Sauvages et Bois Précieux de la Nouvelle-Zélande, by Raoul, 16, 155Flora Antarctica, by J. D. Hooker, 24, 155Florae Insulartim Novae Zelandiae Precursor, by A. & R. Cunningham, 154Flora Novae-Zelandiae, by J. D. Hooker, 25, 155Forbes, Charles, 16, 51Forster, J. R., 10, 25; his Observations,153Fuller, F. R., 42Genesisof Worlds and Systems, by Bickerton, 158Geological Expedition to the West Coast of Otago, by Hector, 156–7Geological Survey Department, 64, 65, 141Geology, N.Z., contributions to, by Dana, 12, 30–1; Dieffenbach, 12–15; Forbes, 16; Hutton, 21–2, 60–9; Hochstetter, 26–31; Haast, 36–47passim; Hector, 48–59passim; Black, 86; and university colleges, 149–51; first survey, 34–5, 56Geology of New Zealand, by Park, 35Geology of the Provinces of Canterbury and Westland, by Haast, 43, 156Geomorphology, 2, 68, 137–45Geomorphology of New Zealand, by Cotton, 142–5, 159Gifford, Algernon Charles, 2, 4, 19; career of, 125–7; and partial impact, 131, 133–5; and lunar theory, 135; publications of, 136, 158–9Goebel, Karl Ritter von, 120, 123Gray, John Edward, 15Guthrie-Smith, William Herbert, 3, 117Haast, Sir Julius von, 2, 25, 33, 34, 60–1, 64, 80, 150, 159; and Sinclair, 20–1; and Hochstetter, 27–31; career of, 36–47passim; publications of, 43, 156Handbook of New Zealand, by Hector, 56Handbook of the New Zealand Flora, by Hooker, 25–6, 32, 155Heaphy, Charles, 29Hector, C. Monro, 49n.Hector, Sir James, 2, 25, 31, 33–5, 60–61, 64, 65, 80, 118; career of, 48–59passim; publications of, 56, 156–7Hill, Sir Arthur, 119–20, 122, 123Hochstetter, Ferdinand von, 24, 36, 44, 159; in Auckland, 26–9; in Nelson, 29–30; publications of, 30–1, 156Holloway, John Ernest, 150Hooker, Sir Joseph D., and N.Z., 24, 26, 159; publications of, 24–5, 32, 153, 155; his Life and Letters,155–6Hooker, Sir William J., 24; publications of, 10–11, 154Hutton, Frederick Wollaston, 2, 21–2, 34, 80, 150, 159; career of, 60–9passim, publications of, 64–9passim,157Huxley, Thomas Henry, 49, 115, 118IconesFilicum, by W. J. Hooker, 11, 154Illustrations of Botany of Captain Cook's Voyage,10, 153Immortality of the Universe, by Gifford, 135Index Faunae Novae Zealandiae, by Hutton, 66, 157Inglis, J. K. H., 127Jeans, Sir James, 129–30, 134Jeffreys, Harold, 129–30Jenness, Diamond, 2Journal of the Polynesian Society,159Keane, Michael Cormac, 90Kirk, Thomas, 33Laplace, Pierre, 67, 128; his nebular hypothesis, 129Lesson, P. A., 154Lesson of Evolution, by Hutton, 67, 68, 157Lindsay, Lauder, 25, 31, 51, 55Lucretius, 96–7Lyall, David, 16, 25Macandrew, James, 72, 73McKay, Alexander, 33, 34Maclaurin, James S., 33, 95Mantell, W. B. D., 33Manual of the New Zealand Flora, by T. F. Cheeseman, 26Manual of the New Zealand Mollusca, by Hutton, 65, 157Maori Races of New Zealand, by Colenso, 32, 156Marshall, Patrick, 140Mellor, Joseph William, 2, 87, 91, 149; career of, 104–16passim; publications of, 107, 112, 115–6, 158Menzies, Archibald, 10–11, 154Moa remains, 30, 41–2, 48Monro, Sir David, 25Moulton, F. R., 129Musci Exotici, by W. J. Hooker, 10, 154Museums—
Auckland, 27Canterbury, Haast at, 34, 44, 46, 61; Hutton at, 34, 66; Speight at, 150Colonial, 56Dominion, 141Otago, 55, 64Neu-Seeland, by Hochstetter, 156New Zealand, by Hochstetter, 30–1, 156New Zealand Company, 12, 16, 71New Zealand Cryptogamia, by Menzies, 154New Zealand Institute, foundation of, 56–7; 61, 64, 123New Zealand Journal of Agriculture,160New Zealand Journal of Science,159New Zealand Journal of Science and Technology,135, 136, 158, 159New Zealand Plants and Their Story, by Cockayne, 120, 158Novara, frigate, 26, 36, 156Originof Species, by Darwin, 4, 18, 41, 62Outline of New Zealand Geology, by Hector, 157Owen, Sir Richard, 48, 49, 118Park, James, 22, 35, 150Partial impact, theory of, 88, 130–5Playfair, Lord Lyon, 85–6Radiationsfrom Radioactive Substances, by Rutherford, 102, 157–8Radioactivity, by Rutherford, 98, 157Raoul, M. E., 16, 25; publications of, 16, 155Report on the Geology and Goldfields of Otago, by Hutton and Ulrich, 65, 157Richard, Achille, 154Romance of the Earth, by Bickerton, 132Romance of the Heavens, by Bickerton, 132, 158Ross, Sir James, 24Rutherford, Ernest, 2, 18, 91, 104, 108, 124, 149; career of, 93–103passim; publications of, 98, 102, 157–8; biographies of, 158Schmidt, G. F. R., 6–7Shand, John, 75; career of, 83–4Sinclair, Andrew, 20–1, 25, 39Skey, William, 33, 35Soddy, Frederick, 18, 98Solander, Daniel Carl, 9–10, 25; publications of, 10, 153Southern Stars,159, 160Speight, Robert, 150Stars, Temporary and Variable, by Bickerton, 130Stuart, Donald McNaughton, 75Thomson, G. M., 107–8, 159Thomson, James Allan, 44–5, 107, 140–2Thomson, Sir J, J., 95, 96, 97, 100Topographical and Geological Exploration in Nelson Province, by Haast, 156Transactions of the N.Z. Institute,57, 66, 120, 156, 159Travels in New Zealand, by Dieffenbach, 12, 15, 155Travers, W. T. L., 33, 121Trees of New Zealand, by Cockayne and Turner, 158Turner, E. Phillips, 158Tutira, by Guthrie-Smith, 117Ulrich, George Henry Frederick, 65, 157Uncle Joe's Nonsense, by Mellor, 115–6, 158United States Exploring Expedition, 12, 154University of N.Z., 35, 58, 84, 89; acts, 74–7; charters, 77; success of, 91–2, 147–9, 151University of Otago, foundation of, 71–6; professors of, 64, 66, 75, 81, 83–5, 150; success of, 77–9, 83Vancouver, Captain George, 10, 154Vegetation der Erde,120–3Vegetation of New Zealand, by Cockayne, 120, 158Vries, Hugo de, 123Wilkes, Charles, 12Zittel, Karl, 138
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