Presidential Address, 163 



Many of us have become members of the Volunteer Force, and, 

 speaking from personal experience, those of us who have been 

 selected to take commissioned rank in that force find that to do our 

 duty properly to our companies and platoons makes consecutive 

 and systematic research work an impossibility. Again, in this 

 connexion, I may be allowed to paraphrase an opening sentence of 

 Professor Sims Woodhead's Address, and say on my own behalf, that 

 when I should have been continuing, or perhaps even completing, 

 certain work on the nature and behaviour of the protoplasmic 

 bodies of Foraminifera, the results of which I thought might be 

 placed befoi'e you in the form of a Presidential Address this evening, 

 I have had to devote much of my time and energy to military 

 organization, and to that subject which is of paramount importance 

 in the minds of many of us, the promotion of science teaching in 

 schools, and the applications of pure and applied science to the 

 industries both of war and peace in this country. I have felt that 

 the position to which you elected me two years ago gave to my 

 efforts in this direction an authority which they would otherwise 

 have lacked, and that though my own work has had to suffer neglect, 

 the opportunities which have been afforded me of speaking on all 

 available occasions, as it were from this cliair, upon this vital matter 

 should not be, nor have they been, neglected. 



Many of us have been at one or other of the Fronts, and though 

 for the most part our ages have kept us from the fighting line, we 

 have been able to render significant services to the Army. Among 

 such I need only mention Dr. Singer, who has spent most of his 

 time in one of the most " unhealthy " areas of the War. It is 

 permissible to refer to our late President, now Colonel Sims Wood- 

 head, who has returned from the charge of a great convalescent 

 hospital at Tipperary to take up a post of great importance at 

 Headquarters in London ; and to our late Secretary, Dr. Shillington 

 Scales, who, in addition to his normal X-ray and electro-thera- 

 peutical work, has devoloped during the War into the position of 

 general handy-man, and substitute for medical colleagues called to 

 the Front from the Cambridge hospitals. I would that it were 

 politic or possible to speak of the work of Dr. Eyre, Professor 

 Hewlett, Mr. Denne, Mr. Eheinberg, Mr. Pledge, Colonel Clibborn, 

 and many others whose modesty, no less than the nature of their 

 work, forbids me to do more than merely to mention their names, 

 but whose industry during the War' in various Government Depart- 

 ments is destined to live in the annals of this pan-clastic struggle 

 in the cause of freedom, justice, and civilization. 



The future is a word which it requires some courage to-day to 

 pronounce. It is a subject which appears premature — in a new and 

 ominous acceptation of the term — as never before in our history it 

 has been premature, to discuss ; but, amid the welter of change and 

 event, it is not difificuU to distinguish one or two points in 



