14 president's address. 



certain purposes or persons, it ceases to be science, and becomes 

 mere empiricism. This Association stands as a protest against 

 tlie shoit-sighted and utilitarian policy of those who would cul- 

 tivate only what they characteristically call the bread and butter 

 sciences. Our purpose is the advancement of all the sciences, 

 believing, as we do, that the true advance of one is inseparably 

 connected with that of all the others, and by the advance we do 

 do not simply mean the increase in knowledge of its laws, but 

 also in the application of it to the wants of mankind. Too often 

 in the past the advance of science has been checked for genera- 

 tions by those who said they knew that the earth stood still, and 

 who did their best to make it do so, and our protest is against the 

 views of men of the same stamp in the present day who think 

 they know everything and select wliat is useful. Is that dreamy 

 astronomer to be banished because he sits in 'some darkened dome 

 peering through his telescope at some distant star, and wanting 

 to know where it is. AVhat has that got to do with the material 

 advancement of the people, says the Utilitarian. Nay, that very 

 quest turned into a demand for better mechanical contrivances, 

 better glass, and better workmen, led Fraunhofer to strain every 

 nerve to meet it. He will examine light in its passage through 

 lenses most minutely, and thus learn to correct the previous errors 

 in his telescopes, and while he did that he found those detinite 

 lines in the spectrum that will for ever be known by his name. 

 He recognised their exact coincidence with those given by well- 

 known terrestrial substances, and so gave the world the spectro- 

 scope, that most wondei'ful instrument working out through the 

 most abstract science, the quickest, most pei'fect — aye, even the 

 cheajDest way of answering a thousand pressing questions in the 

 money-making arts. Has chemistry served its pui'pose when it 

 analyses our soils and our minerals ; when it makes a mixture to 

 take gold from quartz, and money out of everything. Is it not to 

 go into our schools and colleges and universities, and teach those 

 who will never use its solvents — those wonderful affinities in 

 nature, those laws of combination and dissolution, of solution and 

 crytallisation — the laws which formed the water, built wp the 

 solid rock, the earth, the flowers ? Is the study of pure mathe- 

 matic to be banished because it cannot And an equation for the 

 locality of a big nugget, wlien it has found and is finding 

 thousands of equations which are mines of untold wealth in the 

 material advancement of humanity. No, certainly not ; for 'tis 

 fitting that man, dwelling in that infinitely complicated organism, 

 his body, which responds on its ten thousand strings to every 

 breath of nature, should study not one or two, but all tlie laws 

 which govern it for weal or woe, and learn to place himself in 

 harmony with all. 



