Science and Scholarship in Hungary [antikvár]

THE ORGANIZATION AND POLICY OF SCIENCE AND SCHOLARSHIP IN HUNGARY By Tibor Erdey-Grúz, D.Sc. Professor of Physical Chemistry, Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest; President of the Hungárián Academy of Sciences THE PAST There is a long and respectable tradition of scholarship and science in Hungary, even though economic and cultural progress in the country was long hindered by conditions adverse to its development, dating back to the sixteenth century. The Turks occupied a large part of the country for a hundred and fifty years, and after they had been ex-pelled, Hungárián freedom was curtailed under the oppressive régime of the Austrian Habsburgs. As a result, the ideas of the Enlightenment only reached Hungary in the eighteenth century and became linked to the struggle for national independence. New and progressive ideas in Hungary were closely associated with the cultivation of the Hungárián language and a desire for the renewal and revival of Hungárián literature and the spreading of culture. It was due to these acute struggles, lasting for several centuries, that science in Hungary was long relegated to the background. Yet several of the medieval national kings of Hungary had already recog-nized the importance of science and scholarship and supported its advancement. The first university in the country was founded in Pécs more than six hundred years ago, but again, owing to the storms of history, only succeeded in functioning for a short while. The value of learning and science on a socially significant scale was only truly rediscovered in Hungary by progressive thinkers in the nineteenth century. Proposals for the foundation of a learned society had been repeatedly put forward from the beginning of the century, but the Academy of Sciences only came into being in 1825. There were a large number of scientists and scholars in Hungary working mostly in the universities, during the last century. They included, among others, Ányos Jedlik (1800-1895) who discovered the dynamo, preceding Siemens by six years; János Bolyai (1802-1860), one of the discoverers of non-Euclidean geometry; Ignác Semmelweis (1818-1865) who discovered the cause of puerperal fever; Loránd Eötvös (1848-1919) whose torsion balance was the