It is on some such lines as these, I think, that the problem will be solved. It is essentially a practical problem, and the exhaustion of our coalfields will furnish the necessary stimulus for its solution. Even now perhaps Italy might achieve economic independence by the expenditure of a few million pounds upon research on the lines indicated. I may add in parenthesis that, on thermodynamical grounds which I can hardly summarize shortly, I do not much believe in the commercial possibility of induced radio-activity. Before I turn to the principal part of my subject I should like to consider very briefly the influence on art and literature of our gradual conquest of space and time. I think that the blame for the decay of certain arts rests primarily on the defective education of the artists. An artist must understand his subject matter. At present not a single competent poet and very few painters and etchers outside the Glasgow School understand industrial life, and I believe that there is only one architect of any real originality who understands the possibilities of ferro-concrete. I do not know his name, but he produced in Soissons before the war a market-place with the dignity and daring of an ancient Egyptian temple. If I knew that he had been entrusted with the rebuilding of Soissons, I could not regret its destruction. Now if we want poets to interpret physical science as Milton and Shelley did (Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up-to-date in their chemical knowledge), we must see that our possible poets are instructed, as their masters were, in science and economics. I am absolutely convinced that science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than are the classics, but the products of this stimulus do not normally see the light because scientific men as a class are devoid of any perception of literary form. When they can express themselves we get a Butler or a Norman Douglas. Not until our poets are once more drawn from the educated classes (I speak as a scientist), will they appeal to the average man by showing him the beauty in his own life as Homer and Virgil appealed to the street urchins who scrawled their verses on the walls of Pompeii.