Alumni Oration

"Alumni Oration: Education in Preparation for a Career in Science" Alumni Bulletin 9, 1 (June 30, 1931): 7-9. (UA Case 67a, Box 2)

The oration on behalf of the Associated Alumni of the University of New Brunswick, delivered according to custom at the encaenial exercises of the University of New Brunswick, was from the lips of D. Upton Hill, Ph.D., Professor of Chemistry at Acadia University, Wolfville, N.S., and a distinguished graduate of the University of New Brunswick, Dr. Hill took as his subject, "Education in the University of New Brunswick, and in the Public Schools in Preparation for a Career in Science."

The address was as follows:

Your Honour, Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am very conscious of the great honour that has been done me in selecting me to speak on behalf of the Associated Alumni at the Encaenia. I am still more conscious of this honour when I think of the abilities and distinction of the men who have delivered the Alumni Oration in past years. But I have accepted the invitation without hesitation because I believed it was given to me as a representative of that period in the development of the University, and those interests which aroused my enthusiasm while a student here on the hill.

Therefore, I take as my subject, "Education in the University of New Brunswick and in the Public Schools in Preparation for a career in Science."

King's College, Fredericton, early in its life made able provision for those scientific studies which are the handmaids of medicine by bringing James Robb, M.D., from Edinburgh. Dr. Robb belonged to those days when scientific men were interested in all branches of science. He was a friend of William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, the physicist, on the one hand, and on the other a correspondent on scientific matters of Benjamin Silliman, Pale's first chemist and geologist. A comparatively early death cut short his career, but not until after twenty-three years of service to the college in Fredericton.

His successor, Loring Woart Bailey, came, hardly more than a boy, straight from the Harvard of Agazziz and Gray. Many of the older U.N.B. men recall his lucid logically arranged lectures, illustrated by beautiful drawings which he made so deftly on the blackboard. His reserved quiet manner did not conceal from his students the fact that he could always be depended on to be the students' friend in any trouble.

Start in Engineering

A few years after Dr. Bailey came, the University started a development in a different direction which was destined to bear much fruit. President Brydone-Jack in his report for the year 1870 says that the Professor of English and Philosophy (Mr. Jardine) had relieved him of the Freshman class in Mathematics, thereby giving him leisure to form a special class in Surveying and Engineering. The University, though lacking equipment for technical work, gave sound courses in fundamentals on which to build. Hence, before a full course in Engineering was established there came out from the University men who distinguished themselves in this field. May I mention two from my own home, St. Stephen, Dr. Wallace Broad who had a distinguished career as a mining engineer in South Africa and China, and the late David Maxwell who was engaged on so many important pieces of construction in this province. The University has turned out over two hundred Civil Engineers, men of a virile type, who have done their full part in locating and building railways through the wildernesses of the Dominion, in making safe its harbors, and spanning its rivers with bridges.

The first group of graduates in electrical engineering belonged to the classes of 1905 and 1906. The number of men going into electrical engineering has increased with the immense increase in hydro-electric developments.

Forestry School

In 1908 came the School of Forestry. At the time that it was established the larger number of our graduates were going to the Canadian West, either as Civil Engineers or public school teachers. I well remember Dr. James Robertson's use of the word "satisfactions" at the Forestry Convention down in the House of Assembly chamber, at which it was recommended that a School of Forestry be established at the University of New Brunswick. In speaking of conserving and increasing the forest wealth of the Eastern Provinces so that more people could live in them, he dwelt on how desirable it is to live in the East where there are "woods and waterfalls and satisfactions."

Dr. John Brittain

I cannot conclude my reference to the past without speaking of John Brittain. I had the good fortune to arrive at the University as a Freshman the year John Brittain came as a teacher, and to have had courses with him throughout his three years here. Although the University had him as a professor for only three years, the public schools and the Normal School had him for almost his whole lifetime. A number of those present here today must have been his students in the Normal School. His influence in improving the teaching of science in New Brunswick was tremendous. With unlimited patience, industry, and skill he demonstrated to his college classes the quantitative laws of chemistry. We knew these laws, because we had discovered them ourselves in our teacher's measurements. Almost every examination question began with the phrase "Argue that." Looking back at my notes on his lectures I am amazed at the amount of ground covered, considering how complete and careful his quantitative demonstrations were, and how all the conclusions and arguments were drawn from the lips of his students. The secret of this was very careful preparation of all the material before the class came in. I do not know if any of his old students is teaching science with the patience and thoroughness of John Brittain. We are not so constituted. But I do know that his example has left its impress on the schools of New Brunswick, and I hope this influence will long continue. I must say in passing that the University of New Brunswick has been lucky also in the occupants of its chair of Chemistry since Dr. Brittain left us.

Work of Future

But it is of preparation for the scientific developments of the future and the part played by the schools, the University, and the Library in this preparation that I wish to speak. If I speak chiefly from the point of view of the chemist it is because I'm more familiar with this work. Before the War we were content to let Germany do for us most of that work which required meticulous chemical knowledge. I do not mean that the Dominion Government Departments, some of the Universities, and some industries were not provided with competent chemists. You can name some brilliant men among them. But these men, though native-born, were among us as foreign missionaries. A hundred years ago Justice Liebig established at the small German University of
Giessen the first laboratory for general laboratory instruction in chemistry in the world.

Changes From War

Because if conditions prevailing in the academic worlds of the different countries during the last century it was inevitable that it should be in Germany that those industries should be built up, that are based on extensive and continued research in chemistry. We thought that only Germany could maintain such industries.

The War changed all that. The United States is self-contained as far as the products of such industries are concerned. Great Britain is nearly so. Canadian chemical industries have not yet been developed in scale to the water power development, but the developments completed would surprise the layman. For example, ammonia made from nitrogen of the air and by product hydrogen from the electrolytic manufacture of caustic soda from salt at Sandwich, Ontario, is made into nitric acid for making fertilizer in a plant at Beloeil on the Richelieu, which is the last word in chemical engineering practice. The Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company, which has recently had the damage by fumes of its smelter at Trail, British Columbia, to orchards, forests, and soils in the State of Washington fixed at $350,000 by the International Joint Commission, is malting those fumes into sulphuric acid and then into superphosphate fertilizer, destined for use on the Prairies, and to make a balanced fertilizer they are building also a plant to make ammonia from atmosphere nitrogen. The processes for smelting the complex ores of Sudbury and of Trail are conspicuous triumphs of Canadian metallurgy. The greater number of such developments are in the Province of Ontario. The Canadian Institute of Chemistry has 167 Fellows and Associates in Ontario, 97 in Quebec, 44 west of the Great Lakes, and 16 in the Maritime Provinces. This gives a rough index of the distribution of manufacturing activity.

Future in Canada

We no longer send harvesters' excursions to the West, because modern machines can do the work of many men. The chief economic problem confronting the Dominion is marketing competition from the Argentine and Russia, and in the face of hostile tariffs in European countries. How ever much we may deplore the world's almost complete repudiation of the generous principles of free trade, it looks as if each country must be more and more self-contained, at least in the next few years, and as if in Canada there would be a scarcity of the more elaborately manufactured products as compared with what are called primary products. We, also, need and have opportunity for scientists. We already have a considerable number of them at work. Because during the War it was found that two or three great industries alone in Germany had more scientific experts than the whole British Empire, the Dominion Government, acting in concert with the Governments of Great Britain and other Dominions formed a National Research Council, and through it established scholarships for research work in science. About 230 research students have completed researches under these grants. These researches have been carried on in the larger Universities. Now the Government in addition to continuing the scholarships, is building a magnificent group of laboratories in Ottawa, where many researches of a physical, chemical, and biological nature are to be carried on for the benefit of the industries of Canada. These are in addition to such old established activities as those of the Experimental Farm, the Mines Branch Laboratories, and the Biological Board, and in the Universities the work of Professors and of Ph. D. students not holding these scholarships.

The Public Schools

Now here is where the public schools come in. The Encyclopedia Brittannica says of New Brunswick that, "By reason of the beauty of its scenery or the excellence of its system of education it has produced a school of poets headed by Charles G. D. Roberts." Wherein does the excellence of the system of education in New Brunswick lie? Up in the Miramichi woods there is a woods road, in the local speech a portage, many miles long leading in to one of the chief branches of the river and connecting with a network of such roads which cover all the lumber woods. It is sometimes rocky, sometimes muddy but mostly alluring, but I know of no part more alluring than a branch road clothed with grass that leads up a gentle rise under white birches, moosewood and hemlocks. But this branch is a twitching road that soon goes down into a swamp and ends at a few stumps. Now, a virtue of the New Brunswick School system is that it keeps one on the portage, that is, a road that goes somewhere. It allows attractive and useful excursions up twitching roads, but it does not let one lose the portage. For example, French is a very swampy subject in parts, but dropping French was unheard of in New Brunswick when I was in school, or I would have dropped it at the third lesson, and I hope that dropping it still is unheard of. The schools are and long have been attractive and practical for most pupils. Science, with which I am chiefly concerned, is introduced with Botany, a science for which the material is at hand, whose useful applications are manifest on every side, and which is esthetically pleasing. I hope it will be long before the influence of Dr. G. U. Hay, Dr. Brittain, Mr. Vroom and their associates will cease.

Foundations of Science

The subjects on which a knowledge of science and especially of chemistry and of physics is built are Mathematics, German, and to a less extent French. I do not advocate the teaching of German in the High Schools in New Brunswick, but the Germans are great publishers as well as prolific scholars and scientists. They republish in German from all languages. One who reads the German language with ease has the key to most of the world's scientific and scholarly literature. I commend it to the attention of students in college. A language cannot be acquired when needed. It should be started early, a little more added daily with constant repetition in various guises, until a large vocabulary becomes, as Dr. Harrison used to say, part of our mental furniture. I counsel all parents whose children show an aptitude toward science to keep them on the portage, even when it is swampy and twitching roads allure. A career in physics requires genuine mathematical ability, one in chemistry requires a knowledge of some branches of higher mathematics along with a good memory. I suppose a biologist doesn't need the mathematics but he does need the memory, and manual dexterity of a high order, and skill in drawing. All kinds of scientists need manual dexterity, but it is surprising how some of the most awkward Freshmen become skilful Seniors in laboratory technique.

Diversities of Gifts

"There are diversities of gifts." An American authority on education states that only one-fifth of the students in the American High Schools are capable of going on to a college education. I do not know what the proportion in New Brunswick is but I am sure that it is much higher than one-fifth. A primary concern of parents is the education of their children. We in New Brunswick must think of something more than providing the province with its needed number of professional men. The Maritime Provinces, like Scotland have long sent out their sons to other regions where their special qualities have won them high places. I hesitate to speculate on the state of Pictou County if all the University Presidents and Professors, ministers and other professional men who have gone through Pictou Academy had been obliged to remain in the county. I do not know if this egress from the Maritime Provinces will continue. I rather think it will, and that some of it will turn aside from the United States and Western Canada into the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec. We see this already in the case of our Foresters and Electrical Engineers. The advice given by the late President Hadley of Yale in a talk to a group of students on education for business, applies here: "Don't go in at the bottom and work up, but get as long a ladder as you can and go in through one of the upper windows." The New Brunswick Government by its generous provision of the magnificent building to house the Departments of Forestry and Geology and its support of those Departments has assured the education of young men not only to develop the resources of this province but also it has opened to many of our sons the road to participation in the development of the rich mineral resources of our progressive neighboring province to the north and its sister on the west.

Functions of Librarian

And the Government has provided a Library Building also. When one has a fireproof library building with facilities for the safe-keeping and the using of books, treasures naturally flow into it. Much valuable library material which existed in New Brunswick in the past has been burned in private houses or carried to Massachusetts or Ottawa. Our new library building which was dedicated this week, the new Provincial Museum in Saint John, and the Library opened four years ago at Mount Allison University, should do much to make it unnecessary for future students of any phase of New Brunswick activities to leave the province to get this information.

In connection with research in science, it is expensive to build up and maintain an adequate library. Science advances along a broad front. Now and again a single set of a single worker or group of workers attracts wide attention as Banting's discovery of insulin or Milliken's work on cosmic rays, but these are mere incidents in the continuous investigations of these men, and they are tied up with the work of many others in different countries. The research worker wants access not to some but to all of the Journals. The libraries of McGill and Harvard, not so far from Fredericton, are able to provide this. But we in the smaller colleges can have most of what we need. Our college libraries can own the more important journals and the larger libraries will loan or supply photostat copies of the articles which our Abstract Journals suggest may be useful. May I commend to graduates of the University of New Brunswick the example of one of my old students who is now a practising physician in Nova Scotia. Without any outside suggestion as far as I know, he sent me a check to pay for an additional journal in chemistry for the Acadia Library, and he did the same thing for the biology department, and he wrote that he wished to continue these subscriptions each year as long as he should be able to do so. I am glad that he is only about thirty years old now.

The service of the Library will eventually be to industry as well as to undergraduate studies, history, literature and science. The technical man connected with any industry within easy reach of New York can go into the New York Public Library, enter the room devoted to any branch of science or technology, and, after signing his name and address, take down from their shelves the bound volumes of any journal in any language. The service to industries carrying on any programme of research is very great. May this Library Building be an important tool in the industrial advance of our province.