Welsh Journals

THE WELSH OUTLOOK NOTES OF THE MONTH Viriamu The Life of John Viriamu Jones, Jones the publication of which we briefly noticed last month, is a valuable contribution to the history of higher education in Wales. It provokes many reflections. One is the immense debt we all owe to some half dozen men for their pioneering labours in founding the colleges and establishing the University of Wales. Some of these pioneers are still with us, and if in the Welsh Outlook we sometimes criticize the position taken by them to-day it is with a full sense of the splendid work they did yesterday and the day before, and of the respect which any views they utter must always deserve. A second reflection is the prodigal way in which we waste some of our most precious gifts. Viriamu Jones was clearly a man of excep- tional worth, of power, and charm and cheerfulness. Yet from the day of his first appointment at twenty- five to his death at forty-four, he lived in a state of over-work. It may be urged that this was his fault, and that there is no remedy for a man of his ardent type. In this there is truth, but it is also true that to do his work as Principal, as that post is usually conceived, he had to live in an endless fever of meetings and trains and committees and speeches and lectures, escaping for hurried fortnights to Switzerland, and later for longer breakdowns to Naples or the Nile. It would be interesting to count the number of times he writes in his letters to his wife I have had a terrible week of meetings." And there is something ironical and pathetic to find a man of his gifts beginning to read for the Bar with a view to securing some post which would give him leisure to proceed with his special scientific work. While he was engaged in valuable researches he would have to leave to attend a House Committee to decide inter alia how many additional scrubbing- brushes should be ordered for the College." A AUGUST, 1915 third reflection which comes home to one in reading this book is the way in which fine instruments like Viriamu Jones have to waste precious energies wrestling with dull, rich people for a few pounds to devise fresh means for more rich people to make more money! For, as Principal Griffiths once pointed out in these pages, the debt of industry and commerce to the sort of research Viriamu Jones pleaded for is simply incalculable. When will the rich people of Glamorganshire and Monmouthshire come to the College Council beseeching to be allowed to pay some moiety of their debt to men of science ? As for the coal itself God put it there. The means to bring it to the surface and send it over the world we owe primarily to thinkers. The colliers, too, in their pride and clamour, might do worse than remember this. The Con* The Conference has held one more ference on meeting. (Is this to be the last ?). University The business consisted of receiving Reform the resolutions of the several Authorities on the scheme for the Welsh Medical School. The adoption of the scheme had been favoured by large majorities at the Univer- sity Court, the Cardiff College Council, and. of course, at the Board of Management of King Edward VlIth Hospital, Cardiff. At the Aberystwyth College Council the majority was small, while the Bangor Council and the Guild of Graduates struck a note of dissent. The Bangor Council gave only pro- visional approval to the scheme pending the consider- ation of University reorganization, and the Guild of Graduates withheld its observations on the understanding that the scheme would not be re- garded as a precedent in any future scheme of re- organization. After receiving the resolutions of these bodies the Conference decided to send a