ADDRESS 
BY 
SIR JOHN F. W. HERSCHEL, BART., F.R.S., 
&C. &C. 
GENTLEMEN,—The terms of kindness in which I have been introduced to 
your notice by my predecessor in the office which you have called on me to 
fill, have been gratifying to me in no common degree—not as contributing 
to the excitement of personal vanity (a feeling which the circumstances in 
which I stand, and the presence of so many individuals every way my su- 
periors, must tend powerfully to chastise), but as the emanation of a friend- 
ship begun at this University when we were youths together, preparing for 
our examinations for degrees, and contemplating each other, perhaps, with 
some degree of rivalry (if that can be called rivalry from which every spark 
of jealous feeling is absent). That friendship has since continued, warm and 
unshadowed for a single instant by the slightest cloud of disunion, and among 
all the stirring and deep-seated remembrances which the sight of these walls 
within which we are now assembled arouse, I can summon none more every 
way delightful and cheering than the contemplation of that mutual regard. 
It is, therefore, with no common feelings that I find myself now placed in 
this chair, as the representative of such a body as the British Association, 
and as the successor of such a friend and of such a man as its late President. 
Gentlemen, there are many sources of pride and satisfaction, in which 
self has no place, which crowd upon a Cambridge man in revisiting for a 
second time this University, as the scene of our annual labours. The de- 
velopment of its material splendour which has taken place in that interval 
of twelve years, vast and noble as it has been, has been more than kept pace 
with by the triumphs of its intellect, the progress of its system of instruction, 
and the influence of that progress on the public mind and the state of science 
in England. When I look at the scene around me—when I see the way in 
which our Sections are officered in so many instances by Cambridge men, 
not out of mere compliment to the body which receives us, but for the in- 
trinsic merit of the men, and the pre-eminence which the general voice of 
society accords them in their several departments—when I think of the large 
proportion of the muster-roll of science which is filled by Cambridge names, 
and when, without going into any details, and confining myself to only one 
branch of public instruction, I look back to the vast and extraordinary de- 
velopment in the state of mathematical cultivation and power in this Uni- 
versity, as evidenced both in its examinations and in the published works of 
its members, now, as compared with what it was in my own time—I am left 
at no loss to account for those triumphs and that influence to which J have 
alluded. It has ever been, and I trust it ever will continue to be, the pride 
and boast of this University to maintain, at a conspicuously high level, that 
sound and thoughtful and sobering discipline of mind which mathematical 
studies imply. Independent of the power which such studies confer as in- 
struments of investigation, there never was a period in the history of science 
