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along of one hundred million dollars. It is the same with the prevention of weeds. Weeds in Western Canada cost the farmer something like eighty million dollars a year, and every success in this matter is sheer gain.

I pass to another subject: the aid that science has given to our work in the air, on which depends, I think, the future of the Canadian North. There is first the really extraordinary development of survey from air photographs, a task which would have been perfectly impossible by the old methods in the more remote districts.

Then there is the cathode-ray compass, our own Canadian invention. It is going to enable an airman to know his course and position from moment to moment, whatever the visibility. This will mean a great deal to our air work, and I hope you realise what that air work stands for. It is the biggest thing of its kind in the world. The freight carried by air in Canada is 80 per cent of the total for the British Empire; three and a half times that of the total of the United States and one-third of the total for the world.

Two further illustrations and I have done. They are working now at the National Research Council on plant hormones, those chemical substances which control the vital processes of living matter. We have cheapened the cost of these hormones and made it practical to use them both in forestry and agriculture. Consider what a weapon this gives us to fight weeds and drought and soil drifting, since it enables us enormously to expedite the growth of a plant. By their use wheat will grow fast enough to get ahead of the weeds, and to

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establish itself before a drought.

Here is my last instance. Before the War the Canadian steel industry used a refractory furnace lining which came from Austria. We have now discovered a Canadian substitute, with the result that foreign imports have ceased and our local industries have enormously developed, both in quantity and quality. The researches which led to this development were ridiculously cheap compared to the value of the results; being less than the additional freight revenue in one year of a single railway which carried the products of the steel industry.

To add to British Columbia University address -

Let me give you an instance. For centuries we have had on the Scottish Borders a sheep disease, of which no one could discover the cause or cure. A year or two ago an investigation into stock diseases in Kenya Colony in East Africa provided, as it were by accident, a remedy for our ancient Border malady.

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will be no results. In the first instance what is needed is what we may call pure science without any utilitarian purpose, for it is only with that point of view that the great discoveries are made. The discoveries of practical value always come as by-products in the search for truth. A great American investigator has written - "Such research work cannot usually be directed towards definite goals, for that involves unknown factors. The success obtained is often reached by wholly unexpected methods, and the problem which is finally solved is not the problem which is foreseen."

At present we have nothing like enough posts for research, and they are nothing like adequately paid. But that will change; it must change, as Governments and people become alive to the immense importance of the task. To you younger people who have not decided upon a profession, but whose minds are active and enterprising, I want to suggest that here may be found a satisfying life's work. First of all it is based on the highest purpose - the pursuit of truth, the unfettered exercise of the human reason. In the second place, it is a work of profound public importance; the men and women who undertake it are in the fullest sense yHe servants of the State. And in the third place it offers a life which can never be dull, for it is a life of perpetual adventure. You can never tell what small by-product of your enquiries may not turn out to be an epoch-making discovery which will change the fate of a nation. There can be nothing narrow and stereotyped about a task which is a continuous fruitful groping into the unknown. A traveller often goes furthest when he is not certain of his goal. I remember saying of my friend President Lowell -

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the late President of Harvard. "Columbus", he said, "when he set out did not know where he was going. When he arrived he did not know where he was. When he returned he did not know where he had been. But all the same he discovered America."