€ President's Address. 



you, and will always be remembered in connection with early scientific 

 enquiry and development in South Africa. But it is not so many 

 years ago, that scientific men were prone to be generally regarded 

 in South Africa as an interesting class of persons who unselfishly 

 devoted their lives to asking questions of Nature, and to getting further 

 conundrums for answers — amiable enthusiasts who actually worked, 

 many of them, for nothing, read papers to each other on all sorts of 

 abstruse subjects at the meetings of the Philosophical Society, and 

 no doubt found out a great many interesting things, but were more 

 or less outside the real and practical business of making a living : and 

 the general and commonplace view probably was, that when it came 

 to dealing with the problems and difficulties of everyday life, your 

 " practical man " was more likely to be successful, or more useful 

 as an adviser, than the scientific man who was continually betraying 

 an almost indecent curiosity about the secrets of Nature, which, in 

 some of its phases, might be regarded by many people as not wholly 

 orthodox or reverent, and devoted his time and his intellect to the 

 solution of questions which did not appear to have any practical 

 bearing on the ordinary problems of life. By degrees, however, the 

 practical value of scientific enquiry, and of scientific knowledge, 

 became more generally apparent. Overlapping boundaries of farms, 

 for instance, and consequent litigation, demonstrated the necessity 

 of a scientific system of survev. Thousands of pounds have since 

 been spent on the triangulation of the Cape Colony, and a secondary 

 triangulation is in progress. The main triangulation has been ex- 

 tended throughout South Africa : and the work has been carried 

 forward through Northern Rhodesia to Tanganyika, in the shape of 

 a geodetic survey which will in due course be prolonged to Cairo. 

 With this great work the name of David Gill, the first President of 

 this Association, will always be honourably associated. The Ameri- 

 can enquiry into the causes of Texas fever, and the scientific demon- 

 stration of the fact that the disease was carried by ticks, led to the 

 scientific investigation of the causes of the many other diseases which 

 affect our flocks and herds in this country ; and whereas twenty years 

 ago there was no bacteriological laboratorv in South Africa supported 

 by public funds, now there are at least four. The most remarkable 

 advance has been made in the matter of discovering the means of 

 immunising domestic animals against the manifold diseases to which 

 they are subject in this country, and the great progress which has 

 been attained in ascertaining the true causes of these diseases 

 promises to lead to the discovery, in time, of the means of immuni- 

 sation against all of them. It is, indeed, in the matter of fighting 

 disease, whether amongst animals or plants, that the practical appli- 

 cation of the results of scientific study has mnde its utility evident 

 to the mass, especially to the rural portion, of the population. The 

 mining industry has always been a scientific industry : its successful 

 development, whether on the mechanical or on the metallurgical side, 

 has always evidently depended on the advancement of science in its 

 own particular spheres : but to impress on a praclically-minded 



