290 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



the hare, as Sir J. J. Thomson, in the article already referred to, 

 says, " not by a happy accident or by the application of new 

 and more powerful methods than those at the disposal of his 

 predecessors, but by that of the oldest of chemical methods, 

 the use of the balance." 



About the same time, 1896, he became closely connected 

 with another important undertaking already alluded to, the 

 organisation of an Institution which would do for England 

 work similar to that accomplished for Germany by the Reich- 

 sanstalt. It had been frequently discussed, and was brought 

 into prominence by Sir Douglas Galton in his address to the 

 British Association at Ipswich in 1895, and again at the Liver- 

 pool meeting in 1 896. Prof. Lodge had at the same time thrown 

 himself very heartily into the proposals, with the result that a 

 Committee was appointed by Lord Salisbury, then Prime 

 Minister, to consider and report on the matter. Lord Rayleigh 

 was chairman, and the Committee reported in 1898 in favour 

 of establishing the Laboratory " as a public institution for 

 standardising and verifying instruments, for testing materials, 

 and for the verification of physical constants." 



The National Physical Laboratory was the result. Lord 

 Rayleigh became chairman of the Committee, and under his 

 care the Laboratory has grown in less than twenty years from 

 an establishment with a staff of fifteen or twenty, and an income 

 of perhaps £5,000, to one with a staff of nearly 600 and an 

 expenditure in 191 7-1 8 of about £100,000. 



With all this growth he has been closely connected, and his 

 wise guidance has shown the way to surmount many diffi- 

 culties. 



Some ten years later he became prominently connected 

 with another most important work. In a paper read before the 

 Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester he had dis- 

 cussed very completely the fundamental principles involved in 

 flight, pointing out in particular the need for experimental 

 work and the conditions under which model research could 

 prove successful ; thus when in 1908, at the instigation of Lord 

 Haldane, then Secretary of State for War, the Prime Minister 

 (Mr. Asquith) appointed the Advisory Committee for Aero- 

 nautics " for the superintendence of the investigations at the 

 National Physical Laboratory, and for general advice on the 

 Scientific problems arising in connection with the work of the 



