322 AIM AND PROGRESS OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 



investigator is compelled, during the entire labours of his life, 

 to strictly limit his field, and to confine himself to those branches 

 which suit him best. 



We must not, however, forget that the more the individual 

 worker is compelled to narrow the sphere of his activity, so 

 much the more will his intellectual desires induce him not to 

 sever Ids connection with the subject in its entirety. How shall 

 he go stout and cheerful to his toilsome work, how feel confident 

 that what has given him so much labour will not moulder use- 

 lessly away, but remain a thing of lasting value, unless he 

 keeps alive within himself the conviction that he also has added 

 a fragment to the stupendous whole of Science which is to 

 make the reasonless forces of nature subservient to the moral 

 purposes of humanity ? 



An immediate practical use cannot generally be counted on 

 a priori for each particular investigation. Physical science, it 

 is true, has by the practical realisation of its results transformed 

 the entire life of modern humanity. But, as a rule, these appli- 

 cations appear under circumstances when they are least expected ; 

 to search in that direction generally leads to nothing unless cer- 

 tain points have already been definitely fixed, so that all that has 

 to be done is to remove certain obstacles in the way of practical 

 application. If we search the records of the most important 

 discoveries, they are either, especially in earlier times, made by 

 workmen who their whole lives through did but one kind of 

 work, and, either by a happy accident, or by a searching, re- 

 peated, tentative experiment, hit upon some new method ad- 

 vantageous to their particular handicraft; others there are, 

 and this is especially the case in most of the recent discoveries, 

 which are the fruit of a matured scientific acquaintance with 

 the subject in question, an acquaintance that in each instance 

 had originally been acquired without any direct view to 



Our Association represents the whole of natural science. To- 

 day are assembled mathematicians, physicists, chemists and 

 zoologists, botanists and geologists, the teacher of science and 

 the physician, the technologist and the amateur who finds 



