Presidential Address. 159 



Flanders ; the collapse of Eussia ; the clanger of Italy. But we 

 meet to-day more hardened, more determined to win, to endure, to 

 suffer, if necessary, than ever before ; more convinced than ever 

 before of the righteousness of our cause, and of the ultimate 

 triumph of peaceful civilization, founded by, and reposing upon, 

 the solidarity and the world-influence and power of the combined 

 English-speaking race. More than ever to-day we can realize the 

 fundamental truth expressed by Dr. Sims Woodhead in that 

 Presidential Address to which I have already referred, when he 

 said, " We had no alternative, we must fight or be content to see 

 the weak trampled upon, the free fettered, liberty restricted, and 

 brute force worshipped as a fetish by a nation hypnotized by the 

 concentration of a self-conscious gaze upon its own intellectual 

 achievements and material prosperity, and led, or misled, by a 

 small, but powerful, if not intellectual, caste of self-seeking and 

 overbearing Prussian militarists." 



Meanwhile, it has become possible for some of the workers 

 upon War-problems to publish to the world a certain portion of 

 their results, and the Transactions of the Eoyal Microscopical 

 Society afford significant evidence of the work that has been done. 

 At our February Meeting, Dr. Cropper exhibited to the Society the 

 results of his work upon dysenteric cysts ; in March, Mr. (now Sir) 

 Kenneth W. Goadby read a paper on the " Bacteriology of Septic 

 War Wounds " ; in April, Dr. Sort read a remarkable — if contro- 

 versial — paper on the " Life-history of the Meningococcus." These 

 are papers, to which m'c have given the considered and deliberate 

 authority of publication in our Journal, on departments of War- 

 work that can properly be published during the War. But I ask 

 you to reflect for a moment upon the other — the as yet unwritten 

 papers, dealing with even more important War-work for which 

 Fellows of this Society are responsible. With a view to confut- 

 ing the ohiter dicta of some of our critics, I have made it my duty 

 to follow the activities of many of our Fellows, and I deeply regret 

 that at the present moment of time it is not permissible to do 

 more than hint — and often not even that — at work to which we 

 shall be able proudly to look back after the War. We all know 

 — often to our inconvenience and cost — the widespread and 

 jealous powers of the Defence of the Realm Act, referred to by its 

 irreverent critics as " Dora." This prngmatical Force, as well as 

 the sense of decency and becoming modesty of the most impor- 

 tant workers, p'-ohibits more than a passing reference to the 

 real and solid work of the Society during the War, but we may 

 hope that the day is not far distant when the lips of our working 

 Fellows will be unsealed, and we shall be enabled to make revela- 

 tions which must, and will, deeply impress the scientific world. 



At this juncture it has seemed to me that it would not be unin- 

 teresting to make a detailed examination into the effect of the War 



