6 INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 



since tho making- of the world," the silent crew gazes on the huge cliffs 

 which are the foundations and buttresses of the continent above. 



It is with the same feeling of awe that we examine the funda- 

 mental facts and lessons of the new science. 



First and foremost of the lessons we must place the i-evelation 

 that this undenvorld exists, the fact that there are processes in Nature 

 which are utterly beyond the intervention of man so far as we have 

 yet been able to learn. It may be said that this holds true in many 

 ways already known; but there is a radical difference between the 

 older and the newer knowledge. It is true, for example, that man 

 cannot stay the action of the sun upon the waters of the globe, and 

 prevent the vapours from mounting into the clouds ; but he can .shelter 

 any particular quantity of vvater from the sun's rays, and check the 

 evaporation of that quantity at least. He cannot vniderstand how the 

 seed grows to be a tree, much less manufacture a seed of the simplest 

 plant; but he can keep water away from the seed, .-ind vender its latent 

 powers abortive. On the other hand, the disiutegiutiuii of the radium 

 atoms proceeds at a rate which is entirely beyond man's control, in the 

 sense that the rate cannot be affected by any disposition which he may 

 make, or, at any rate, has been able to make as yet. We know of only 

 one other phenomenon in Nature of the same simplicity. The action 

 of gravity is also most extraordinary in being independent of physical 

 and chemical conditions; and we are unable, except in the refreshing- 

 pages of a certain popular nove'ist, to hinder the 'uutual attraction of 

 two bodies by any arrangements of material such as the interposition 

 of a screen between them. Hitherto gravity has stood alone. It is 

 surely a most significant fact that we have now found other pheno- 

 mena which resemble those of gravity in all these respects ; and a fact 

 of additional sig-nificance that the most penetrating radiations of 

 which we have knowledge, the so-called hard gamma rays of radium, 

 take exactly the same cognizance of the various atoms as gravity does ; 

 the '' mass " is the one and only feature which is of importance in 

 either case. This, then, is the first gi-eat lesson of radio-activity : the 

 revelation of the existence of phenomena which are not to be classed 

 with the most of physical and chemical eft'ects, but rather belong to a 

 class of which gravity has hitherto been the only representative. 



Let us proceed to consider a second. We have only to move one 

 step forward, and we are at once face to face with the wonderful 

 theory of radio-active change which we owe to Rutherford and Soddy. 

 Surely there never was a stranger or more unexpected realisation of 

 an idle dream. The old alchemist laboured to bring about the trans- 

 mutation of metals, and failed. Now we know that we can actually- 



