1868. | Mathematical and Physical Science. 507 
MATHEMATICAL AND Puysicat Science. (Section A.) 
The proceedings in this Section were opened on Thursday, 
August 20th, by an inaugural address from the President, Pro- 
fessor Tyndall, F.R.S. Space will not allow us to give this 
admirable address in full, but in the following abstract we have 
endeavoured to place the substance of it before our readers, pre- 
serving as nearly as possible the sequence of argument and the 
language of the speaker. Quoting Fichte,—who in his lectures on 
the “ Vocation of the Scholar,” insisted that the culture for the 
scholar should not be one-sided but all-sided—Professor Tyndall 
said that this idea was to some extent illustrated by the consti- 
tution and the labours of the British Association. We have here 
a body of men engaged in the pursuit of Natural Knowledge, but 
variously engaged. While sympathizing with each of its depart- 
ments, and supplementing his culture by knowledge drawn from 
all of them, each student selects one subject for the exercise of his 
own original faculty—one line along which he may carry the light 
of his private intelligence a little way into the darkness by which 
all knowledge is surrounded. Thus, the geologist faces the rocks ; 
the biologist fronts the conditions and phenomena of life; the 
astronomer, stellar masses and motions; the mathematician, the 
properties of space and number; the chemist pursues his atoms, 
while the physical investigator has his own large field in optical, 
thermal, electrical, acoustical, and other phenomena. The British 
Association, then, faces nature on all sides, and pushes knowledge 
centrifugally outwards, while through circumstances or natural 
bent each of its working members takes up a certain line of re- 
search in which he aspires to be an original producer, being content 
in all other directions to accept instruction from his fellow men. 
The sum of our labours constitutes what Fichte might call the 
sphere of natural knowledge. In the meetings of the Association 
it is found necessary to resolve this sphere into its component 
parts, which take concrete form under the respective letters of 
our Sections. 
Partly through mathematical and partly through experimental 
research, physical science has of late years assumed a momentous 
position in the world. Both in a material and in an intellectual 
point of view it has produced, and it is destined to produce, 
immense changes,—vast social ameliorations, and vast alterations 
in the popular conception of the origin, rule, and governance of 
things. Miracles are wrought by science in the physical world, 
while philosophy is forsaking its ancient metaphysical channels 
and pursuing those opened or indicated by scientific research. This 
must become more and more the case as philosophic writers become 
more deeply imbued with the methods of science, better acquainted 
