1921] to Sir James and Lady Dewar 417 



All this shows it is really the ever-helpful members who have 

 been the instrument of maintaining this Institution. It is a family 

 descent, which has become with them an intuition ; it passes to the 

 children. The Institution would never have existed, never could 

 have existed, but for the belief that it was not only a noble thing 

 but a proper thing to be able to convey to the young children what 

 science really is by listening to Faraday and the other great professors 

 who have given the Christmas lectures. The Institution has been 

 chiefly maintained from the inside, and the hope is that it will 

 continue to be so. I know of no older club, so called, or combina- 

 tion of people, desirous of following one object and one object alone, 

 learning to tolerate and to hear things they cannot pretend to under- 

 stand, any more than I pretend to understand anything like the 

 whole of what I have heard to-night. The training that is got here, 

 the learning to sit and try to understand, is something which is really 

 of great value in life. 



On behalf of my wife I may say that she has an adoration for 

 the Royal Institution. During the war she suffered from very poor 

 health, and I was very anxious to get her to move to Cambridge, 

 because, as I told her, the Germans would never touch Cambridge. 

 But nothing would induce her to leave the Institution, though had 

 a bomb fallen in our midst the conflagration and the ruins of our 

 library and laboratory, with all its historical apparatus, would have 

 been a terrible disaster in every possible way. We hope to go on 

 for a little longer, but that would be impossible unless we had the 

 support and aid of men of the highest mental calibre and original 

 genius, like the Master of Trinity and Sir Ernest Rutherford, his 

 successor in the chair of Natural Philosophy. If Professor Ruther- 

 ford adorns the Institution as did Lord Rayleigh and Sir Joseph 

 Thomson, I may pass away in peace, leaving it more secure and more 

 firmly established than when I entered it. 



I thank you most gratefully on behalf of my wife. We hope to 

 see you upstairs to look at the cup and to hear my fiddle. 



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