34 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



all the chemists the association contains will not transmute a lay- 

 man into any more precious kind of metal. Yet it is my hard 

 destiny to have to address on scientific matters probably the most 

 competent scientific audience in the world. If a country gentle- 

 man, who was also a colonel of volunteers, were by any mental 

 aberration on the part of the commander-in-chief to be appointed 

 to review an army corps at Aldershot, all military men would 

 doubtless feel a deep compassion for his inevitable fate. I be- 

 speak some spark of that divine emotion when I am attempting 

 to discharge under similar conditions a scarcely less hopeless 

 duty. At least, however, I have the consolation of feeling that I 

 am free from some of the anxieties which have fallen to those 

 who have preceded me as presidents in this city. The relations 

 of the association and the university are those of entire sympathy 

 and good will, as becomes common workers in the sacred cause of 

 diffusing enlightenment and knowledge. But we must admit 

 that it was not always so. A curious record of a very different 

 state of feeling came to light last year in the interesting biogra- 

 phy of Dr. Pusey, which is the posthumous work of Canon Lid- 

 don. In it is related the first visit of the association to Oxford in 

 1832. Mr. Keble, at that time a leader of university thought, 

 writes indignantly to his friend to complain that the honorary 

 degree of D. C. L. had been bestowed upon some of the most dis- 

 tinguished members of the association. " The Oxford doctors," 

 he says, " have truckled sadly to the spirit of the times in receiv- 

 ing the hodge-podge of philosophers as they did." It is amusing, 

 at this distance of time, to note the names of the hodge-podge of 

 philosophers whose academical distinction so sorely vexed Mr. 

 Keble's gentle spirit. They were Brown, Brewster, Faraday, and 

 Dalton. When we recollect the lovable and serene character of 

 Keble's nature, and that he was at that particular date probably 

 the man in the university who had the greatest power over other 

 men's minds, we can measure the distance we have traversed since 

 that time, and the rapidity with which the converging paths of 

 these two intellectual luminaries, the university and the associa- 

 tion, have approximated to each other. This sally of Mr. Keble's 

 was no passing or accidental caprice. It represented a deep-seated 

 sentiment in this place of learning, which had its origin in his- 

 toric causes, and which has only died out in our time. One potent 

 cause of it was that both bodies were teachers of science, but did 

 not then in any degree attach the same meaning to that word. 

 Science with the university for many generations bore a significa- 

 tion different from that which belongs to it in this assembly. It 

 represented the knowledge which alone in the middle ages was 

 thought worthy of the name of science. It was the knowledge 

 gained not by external observation, but by mere reflection. The 



