PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 



Gentlemen, 



When, at our Annual Meeting, I heard my name proposed 

 as your future President, I can hardly tell whether surprise or conster- 

 nation was the prevailing feeling in my mind. The objections I 

 raised (and my nolo episcopari was perfectly genuine and unfeigned) 

 did not proceed from any want of appreciation of the honour you 

 afterwards conferred upon me by your decision, but by a grave 

 doubt of my own fitness for the office ; and I cannot but feel that 

 your choice was made more out of respect for my age than to any 

 service I had rendered, or could be expected to render to your 

 society. With that view of the case in my mind, it has occurred to 

 me that I might be permitted to depart from the usual course, and, 

 instead of a technical Address on the immediate objects of your 

 society, to endeavour, on this my first attempt to put my thoughts 

 on paper to address an audience, to place before you the great 

 improvements in Science, and their application to the necessities 

 and comforts of life, that m)'^ 70 years have allowed me to witness ; 

 and, as I have seen in my boyhood the waterworks under Old 

 London Bridge in action, and, a few years later, stood on the bed of 

 the river, where one of the centre piers of the new one rests, 

 I shall seem to the young men among us as taking them back almost 

 to the dark ages — and dark enough in one sense they indeed were — 

 when the feeble glimmer of a few oil lamps in the streets and shop 

 windows could scarcely penetrate the obscurity of night. Gas was 

 then only just struggling into existence ; and the Paterfamilias of 

 the day wrote letters to the public press in deprecation of a scheme 

 that was to bring fire and pestilence to his very door, and a caricature 

 which I possess makes the expected explosion proceed, not from an 



