PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 
THE VALUE OF SCIENCE 
By our regulations it is the duty of the President, at the annual 
meeting, to deliver an address before the Society. The character of 
the address is not prescribed; but it has been the custom to present 
for the information of the publie some account of the work in which 
the president personally has been engaged, or some aspect of the work 
of the Society generally. 
Of these I have chosen the latter. While my paper directly refers 
to the work of those sections of the Society which have to do with 
the natural sciences, and the illustrations I use are drawn from those 
sciences, I believe much of what I say is applicable to the historical, 
sociological and economic sciences which are ordinarily discussed in 
the literary sections. 
In dealing, in a necessarily brief paper, with a subject of such 
wide generality as the value of science, involving matters which ought 
to be familiar to all, I am haunted by the fear that I shall be found 
to have fallen into the error of emphasizing the obvious or enlarging 
upon the commonplace. If so, my excuse for venturing upon the 
subject must be my belief that it is of very great importance. 
“The real and legitimate goal of the sciences,” said Bacon, “is 
the endowment of human life with new inventions and riches.” He 
wrote at what may be called the dawn of science, at a time when of 
the sciences of light, heat, electricity, chemistry, biology, of all the 
sciences to which we attribute our present progress, only the barest 
elementary facts were known. No doubt his writings, so emphatically 
proclaiming his faith in the possibilities which lay in the diligent study 
of nature, had a strong influence in inspiring the research from which 
such remarkable results have come. 
Three hundred years later we are reaping the benefit of the labors 
of a host of workers in every branch of science. The conditions of 
of life have been completely transformed: travel, by the steamship 
and the railway train; communication, by the telegraph and the 
telephone; hygiene, medicine and surgery have made immense advances: 
by means of the steam engine and the dynamo the forces of nature are 
compelled to the service of man in all kinds of labour saving machinery; 
innumerable conveniences and comforts of our daily life we owe to 
applications of science. 
Proc. 1912. 4. 
