5 62 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



much if any part in the sessions. 

 The meeting next year will be in South 

 Africa under the presidency of Pro- 

 fessor George H. Darwin, who holds 

 the chair of astronomy at Cambridge. 



THE ADDRESS OF THE 

 PRE SID EXT. 



It is as long as forty-two years since 

 the association last met at Cambridge. 

 There was a meeting at Oxford ten 

 years ago after an interval of thirty- 

 four years. The association was or- 

 ganized at York, in 1831, and held its 

 second meeting at Oxford and its third 

 meeting at Cambridge. It met again 

 at Oxford in 1847 and 1860 and at 

 Cambridge in 1845 and 1862. Some of 

 the more conservative elements at the 

 great universities have apparently not 

 altogether welcomed the influx of 

 visitors brought together by the diverse 

 attractions of a meeting of the associa- 

 tion. But if the meetings at the seats 

 of the universities have not been fre- 

 quent, they have tended to be of rather 

 more than usual interest. The very 

 contrast between the conservative and 

 somewhat aristocratic attitude of the 

 universities and the more radical and 

 democratic aspects of the association 

 have given an element of dramatic in- 

 terest. Thus the Oxford meeting of 

 1860 is remembered for the invasion of 

 the Darwinian theory. Bishop Wilber- 

 force had been attacking the then 

 infant theory in a superficial and 

 rhetorical manner and is alleged to 

 have turned to Huxley and asked him 

 whether it was through his grand- 

 father or his grandmother that he 

 claimed his descent from a monkey. 

 Huxley, after stating the case for evo- 

 lution, said that a man has no reason 

 to be ashamed (if having descended 

 from an ape, but that he would be 

 ashamed to be related to a man who 

 used his ability and position to ob- 

 scure the truth. No wonder that it 

 was thirty-four years before the asso- 

 ciation was again invited to meet at 

 the home of 'lost causes and impossible 



loyalties,' nor is it surprising that it 

 should then have been presided over by 

 a great statesman, who once more at- 

 tempted to discredit evolution and the 

 Darwinian theory. 



Now after ten years the association 

 meets at the sister university, and is 

 presided over by the nephew and suc- 

 cessor as head of the British govern- 

 ment of the president of the Oxford 



meeting. 



It is a strange sight as 



viewed from this land of magnificent 

 levels. Mr. Balfour has character and 

 abilities as notable and an intellect 

 even more acute than had Lord Salis- 

 bury; there is a curious similarity in 

 the attitude of the two men toward sci- 

 ence, but at the same time an obvious 

 forward movement in the authority of 

 science when we pass from Oxford to 

 Cambridge, from the older to the 

 younger generation. 



Lord Salisbury told his audience 

 bluntly that he would make a survey 

 ' not of our science but of our ignor- 

 ance ' and instanced atoms, the ether 

 and the origin of life. He rejected 

 natural selection and ended by appeal- 

 ing to the intelligent and benevolent, 

 design of an everlasting creator and 

 ruler. Mr. Balfour is too acute a 

 thinker to set natural selection and de- 

 sign in opposition to one another. He, 

 indeed, takes natural selection for 

 granted and uses it to discredit the 

 possibility of knowledge. He tells us 

 that natural selection working through 

 utility could only give us the senses 

 needed ' to fight, to eat and to bring up 

 children,' not the intellect required to 

 understand physical reality. The more 

 successful we are in explaining the 

 origin of our beliefs ' the more doubt 

 we cast on their validity.' Mr. Balfour, 

 however, is ready to sanction the new- 

 est theories of physical metaphysics, 

 saying that down to five years ago ' our 

 race has. without exception, lived and 

 died in a world of illusions'; now ap- 

 parently Mr. Balfour and a handful of 

 physicists live in a real world of ether 

 and electrical monads. But perhaps 

 Mr. Balfour is a hit ironical, and i9 



