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NATURE 



[Sept. I, 1887 



I believe, in Sections A and B. A joint discussion on 

 gold and silver has been arranged between Sections C 

 and F. As these discussions will be real, and as several 

 eminent foreigners are expected to take part in them, the 

 meeting on the whole promises to be lively. 



The social distractions — conversaziones, receptions, 

 dinners, and excursions — are perplexingly numerous. The 

 hand-books for the excursions have been got up with 

 much care and thoughtfulness. There is, indeed, a 

 separate little hand-book for each excursion, the whole set 

 being done up in a case. Another hand-book of about 

 one hundred pages gives an epitome of the history, anti- 

 quities, meteorology, physiography, flora and fauna of 

 Manchester and the district. 



Thus, so far as the officials are concerned, everything 

 has been done to make the Manchester meeting a suc- 

 cess. At the present moment the weather is not quite 

 what could be wished ; it is raining hard, and the weather 

 is oppressively sultry. We can only hope it will improve 

 before active operations begin. 



Inaugural Address by Sir Henry E. Roscoe, M.P., 

 D.C.L., LL.D., Ph.D., F.R.S., V.P.C.S., President. 



Manchester, distinguished as the birthplace of two of the 

 greatest discoveries of modern science, heartily welcomes to-day, 

 for the third time, the members and friends of the British Asso- 

 ciation for the Advancement of .Science. 



On the occasion of our first meeting in this city in the year 

 1842, the President, Lord Francis Egerton, commenced his 

 address with a touching aUusiun to the veteran of science, John 

 Dalton, the great chemist, the discoverer of the laws of chemical 

 combination, the framer of the atomic theory upon which the 

 modern science of chemistry may truly be said to be based. 

 Lord Francis Egerton said :— " Manchester is still the residence 

 of one whose name is uttered with respect wherever science is 

 cultivated, who is here to-night to enjoy the honours due to a 

 long career of persevering devotion to knowledge, and to receive 

 from myself, if he will condescend to do so, the expression of 

 my own deep personal regret that increase of years, which to 

 him up to this hour has been but increase of wisdom, should 

 have rendered him, in respect of mere bodily strength, unable 

 to fill on this occasion an office which in liis case would have 

 received more honour than it could confer. I do regret that 

 any cause should have prevented the present meeting in his 

 native town from being associated with the name " — and here I 

 must ask you to allow me to exchange the name of Dalton in 

 1842 for that of Joule in 1887, and to add, again in the words 

 of the President of the former year, that I would gladly have 

 served as a doorkeeper in any house where Joule, the father of 

 science in Manchester, was enjoying his just pre-eminence. 



For it is indeed true that the mantle of John Dalton has 

 fallen on the shoulders of one well worthy to wear it, one to 

 whom science owes a debt of gratitude not less than that which 

 it willingly pays to the memory of the originator of the atomic 

 theory. James Prescott Joule it was who, in his determination 

 of the mechanical equivalent of heat, about the very year of our 

 first Manchester meeting, gave to the world of science the results 

 of experiments which placed beyond reach of doubt or cavil 

 the greatest and most far-reaching scientific principle of modern 

 times ; namely, that of the conservation of energy. This, to 

 use the words of Tyndall, is indeed a generalization of con- 

 spicuous grandeur fit to take rank with the principle of gravita- 

 tion ; more momentous, if that be possible, combining as it does 

 the energies of the material universe into an organic whole, and 

 enabling the eye of science to follow the flying shuttles of the 

 universal power as it weaves what the Erdgeist in " Faust " calls 

 "the living garment of God." 



It is well, therefore, for us to remember, in the midst of the 

 turmoil of our active industrial and commercial life, that Man- 

 chester not only well represents the energy of England in these 

 practical directions, but that it possesses even higher claims to 

 our regard and respect as being the seat of discoveries of which 

 the value not only to pure science is momentous, but which also 

 lie at the foundation of all our material progress and all our 

 industiial success. For without a knowledge of the laws of 

 chemical combination all the marvellous results with which 

 modern industrial chemistry has astonished the world could not 

 have been achieved, whilst the knowledge of the quantitative 



relations existing between the several forms of energy, and the 

 possibility of expressing their amount in terms of ordinary 

 mechanics, are matters which now constitute the life-breath of 

 every branch of applied science. For example, before Dalton's 

 discovery every manufacturer of oil of vitriol — a substance now 

 made each week in thousands of tons within a few miles of this 

 spot — every manufacturer had his own notions of the quantity 

 of sulphur which he ought to burn in order to make a certain 

 weight of sulphuric acid, but he had no idea that only a given 

 weight of sulphur can unite with a certain quantity of oxygen 

 and of water to form the acid, and that an excess of any one of 

 the component parts was not only useless but harmful. Thus, 

 and in tens of thousands of other instances, Dalton replaced 

 rule of thumb by scientific principle. In like manner the ap- 

 plications of Joule's determination of the mechanical equivalent 

 of heat are even more general ; the increase and measurement 

 of the efficiency of our steam-engines and the power of our 

 dynamos are only two of the numerous examples which might 

 be adduced of the practical value of Joule's work. 



If the place calls up these thoughts, the time of our meeting 

 also awakens memories of no less interest, jn the recollection 

 that we this year celebrate the Jubilee of Her Most Gracious 

 Majesty's accession to the throne. It is right that the members 

 of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 

 should do so with heart and voice, for, although science requires 

 and demands no royal patronage, we thereby express the feeling 

 which must be uppermost in the hearts of all men of science, 

 the feeling of thankfulness that we have lived in an age which 

 has witnessed an advance in our knowledge of Nature, and a 

 consequent improvement in the physical, and let us trust also in 

 the moral and intellectual, well-being of the people hitherto 

 unknown ; an age with which the name of Victoria will ever be 

 associated. 



To give even a sketch of this progress, to trace even in the 

 merest outline the salient points of the general history of science 

 during the fifty momentous years of Her Majesty's reign, is a 

 task far. beyond my limited powers. It must suffice for me to 

 point out to you, to the best of my ability, some few of the steps 

 of that progress as evidenced in the one branch of science with 

 which I am most familiar, and with which I am more closely con- 

 cerned, the science of chemistry. 



In the year 1837 chemistry was a very different science from 

 that existing at the present moment. Priestley, it is true, had 

 discovered oxygen, Lavoisier had placed the phenomena of com- 

 bustion on their true basis, Davy had decomposed the alkalies, 

 Faraday had liquefied many of the gases, Dalton had enunciated 

 the laws of chemical combination by weight, and Gay-Lussac 

 had pointed out the fact that a simple volumetric relation governs 

 the combination of the gases. But we then possessed no know- 

 ledge of chemical dynamics, we were then altogether unable to 

 explain the meaning of the heat given off" in the act of chemical 

 combination. The atomic theory was indeed accepted, but we 

 were as ignorant of the mode of action of the atoms and as in- 

 capable of explaining their mutual relationship as were the 

 ancient Greek philosophers. Fifty years ago, too, the connexion 

 existing between the laws of life, vegetable and animal, and the 

 phenomena of inorganic chemistry, was ill understood. The idea 

 that the functions of living beings are controlled by the same 

 forces, chemical and physical, which regulate the changes occur- 

 ring- in the inanimate world, was then one held by only a very few 

 of the foremost thinkers of the time. Vital force was a term in 

 everyone's mouth, an expression useful, as Goethe says, to dis- 

 guise our ignorance, for 



" Wo d'.e BegrifFe fehlen. 

 Da tritt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein. " 



Indeed the pioneer of the chemistry of life, Liebig himself, can- 

 not quite shake himself free from the bonds of orthodox opinion, 

 and he who first placed the phenomena of life on a true basis 

 cannot trust his chemical principles to conduct the affairs of the 

 body, but makes an appeal to vital force to help him out of his 

 difficulties ; as when in the body politic an unruly mob requires 

 the presence and action of physical force to restrain it and to 

 bring its members under the saving influence of law and order, 

 so too, according to Liebig's views, in the body corporeal a con- 

 tinual conflict between the chemical forces and the vital power 

 occurs throughout life, in which the latter, when it prevails, in- 

 sures health and a continuance of life, but of which defeat insures 

 disease or death. The jiicture presented to the student of to-day 

 is a very different one. We now believe that no such conflict is 

 possible, but that life is governed by chemical and physical 



