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Show NOTED CRITIC PRAISES NEW HARRIS BOOK I "Dry as Dust, But a Book You Will Regret Missing," Is Caption. (From Chicago Tribune.) You wouldn't think that a book called "Scientific Research and Human Hu-man Welfare," would be intriguing, would you? Dip into Dr. Franklin S. Harris' book of that name, though and you're gone. Not that it's fascinating fas-cinating readin. It's as dry as dust. But the facts which the eminent president of the Brigham Young university uni-versity gathers, with the assistance of a research assistant of his staff, Newbnrn I. Butt, are stimulating. Not that the facts are unknown to us, either. But marshaling them all under one cover, as it were, gives I them an astounding importance. They show what advances scientific research has made in the last hundred hun-dred years and the influence those advances have had upon human web I fare. They devote one part to health and sum up their findings with statistics to prove that the span of human life has been pre-ceptibly pre-ceptibly lengthened. In their second part, which is devoted de-voted to communication, they remind re-mind us of the wonders of telegraphy, teleg-raphy, the telephone and te radio. In the third part, in which they sur-j sur-j vey transportation for the last century, cen-tury, they look at (he obvious motor cars and aeroplanes and steam cars and electric engines. Illumination then takes their attention and then they turiv to agriculture where t hoy find research doing all sorts of useful things which the average city fellow dosen't even suspect. Engineering, mining, manufacturing manufactur-ing and the home are all shown to have been vastly enormously improved im-proved by scientific research. They end their book with a look into the future and answer a question ques-tion which has been asked many a lime by nil of us. How long before everything worth while will lie discovered? dis-covered? They point to the case of a director of the United States patent pat-ent office who a generation ago resigned re-signed his job because , he said, there wasn't any future in the patent pat-ent office: everything worth while had already been patented. And since then, the author says, more important patents have been taken nut than all that had ever been taken out in the history of the world to that time. Each discovery opens the way for two newer discoveries discov-eries and not in the lifetime of any of our great-grandsons will the field of research be exhausted. You'd have no idea until you read this book how himple life wns n hundred years ago simple and dangerous! |