184 president's address — section I. 



English soldiers did in the weary days of the Peninsular 

 War. Nothing is more certain than that neither the writer 

 of that verse nor the translators of it had the least concep- 

 tion of collective science, whether rightly or wrongly so- 

 called. 



Sixty years ago men spoke of the natural sciences and of 

 this or that science, but they had hardly risen to the con- 

 ception of science as a body of correlated sciences. Sir 

 Humphrey Davy, who was chiefly a chemist, preferred to 

 call himself a natural philosopher. In many universities 

 physics is still quaintly called natural philosophy. Comte's 

 Philosophie Positive is scientific. In Germany the word 

 philosophy is still used in that sense. Germans speak of 

 Natur-Wissenschaften, but not of Wissenschaft as a generic 

 term to include them all, to the exclusion of other branches 

 of knowledge. A man who at a German university has 

 made a special study of the sciences becomes doctor of 

 philosophy. Many of the English universities have a science 

 degree, but Oxford makes natural science one of the courses 

 for the Arts degree, refusing in any way to separate the 

 scientific training, lest it seem to be divorced from the 

 ordinary curriculum of a liberal education. I am unable 

 exactly to fix the date at which the modern collective use of 

 the word science sprang up ; but I fancy a close study of 

 Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences might reveal the 

 genesis of the use, and it is Whewell, I believe, whom we 

 have to thank for the use of the hateful form " scientist." 



And here I must close. Please take my Address for what 

 you find it worth, forgiving the author for its deficiencies, 

 partly because he intends well, and partly because it is the 

 very first time he has ever been President of Section I., and 

 it is probable also that he never will be again. If I have not 

 always respected the dignity of the position — if I have some- 

 times been airy and, as some would say, flippant — I have 

 tried to interest and amuse you ; I have remembered what a 

 quantity of improving matter you will hear in the next few 

 days; I have been anxious to assert the independence of 

 letters, and also to »prove that Gideon's Fleece need not of 

 necessity be dry. 



