The back issues of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand are now freely available online. I have been looking through some of the old publications of New Zealand's ecology greats, including the above presidential address by Leonard Cockayne.
In this presidential address, Cockayne makes the case for a strong investment in pure science in New Zealand. I was particularly struck by the following passage, in which Cockayne foresees the advent of genetic engineering and its potential value for plant breeding and agriculture. Keep in mind, while reading this, that it was written in 1919, just 19 years after Mendel's genetic experiments had been re-discovered, ten years after the words "gene", "genotype", and "phenotype" had been coined, a decade before the modern synthesis of evolution by natural selection, and almost 40 years before the genetic code was cracked.
"Our scientific duty as a nation is not only to apply to the best of our ability our present knowledge, but by means of purely academic investigations to discover further fundamental principles on which the greatly improved farming of the future will depend. Suppose, for example, such characters as we wished could be bestowed at will upon certain fodder plants or food plants—i.e., that the plant-breeder could by methods now unknown create exactly the plant suitable for a special environment, just as one can forge a special tool. Experiments of seemingly the most worthless kinds in genetics might lay the foundation for such knowledge, the value of which is beyond our wildest dreams."
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