164 THE GROWTH OF SCIENX'E IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 



a conspicuous share, on the coninuMiconiont of an undertaking' which is 

 not onl3'a great thing in itself, l)ut which, we trust, is the beginning of 

 still greater things to come. And the share which the association has 

 had in this was largely Sir Douglas (xalton's doing. In his address as 

 president of section A, at the meeting of the association at Cardiff in 

 1891, Prof. Oliver Lodge expounded with pregnant words how urgent!} , 

 not pure science only, but industry and the constructive arts — for the 

 interests of these are ever at bottom the same — needed the aid of some 

 national establishment for the prosecution of prolonged and costly ph3's- 

 ical researches, which piMvate enterprise could carr}^ out in a lame fash- 

 ion only, if at all. Lodge's words found an echo in many men's minds, 

 but the response was for a long while in men's minds only. In 1<S1>5, Sir 

 Douglas Galton, having previously made a personal study of an insti- 

 tution analogous to the one desired — namely, the lieichsanstalt at 

 Berlin — seized the opportunity offered to him as president of the asso- 

 ciation at Ipswich to insist, with the authority' not only of the head for 

 the time being of a great scientific body, but also of one who himself 

 knew the ways and wants at once of science and of practical life, that the 

 thing which Lodge and others had hoped for was a thing which could 

 be done, and ought to be done at once. And now to-day we can say 

 it has been done. The National Physical Lal)oratorv has been founded. 

 The address at Ipswich marked the begiiming of an organized effort 

 which has at last ])een crowned with success. A feeling of sadness 

 can not but come over us when we think that Sir Douglas (Jalton was 

 not spared to see the formal completion of the scheme whose ])irth he 

 did so nuich to help, and which, to his last days, he aided in more wa3^s 

 than one. It is the old story — the good which men do lives after them. 



Still older than the association is this nineteenth century, now swiftly 

 drawing to its close. Though the century itself has vet some sixteen 

 months to run, this is the last meeting of the British association wdiich 

 will use the numbers 1800 to mark its date. 



The eyes of the young look ever forward; they take little heed of 

 the short though ever-lengthening fragment of life which lies behind 

 them; they are wholh' bent on that which is to come. The eyes of the 

 aged turn wistfully again and again to the past; as the old glide down 

 the inevitable slope, their present becomes a living over again the, life 

 which has gone before, and the future takes on the shape of a brief 

 lengthening of the past. Ma}' I this evening venture to give rein to 

 the impulses of advancing years i May I, at this last meeting of the 

 association in the eighteen hundreds, dare to dwell for a while upon 

 the past, and to call to mind a few of the changes which have taken 

 place in the world since those autumn days in which men were saying 

 to each other that the last of the seventeen hundreds was drawing 

 toward its end ( 



Dover in the year of our Lord 1799 was in many ways unlike the 



