TJIE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



413 



THE PROGEESS OF SCIEXCE 



THE PHESIDENTIAL ADDEESS 



BEFORE THE miTISH 



ASSOCIATION 



Great Britain is able to supply each 

 year for the presidency of its national 

 association for the advancement of sci- 

 ence a scientific man of distinction, who 

 can deliver an address in a form inter- 

 esting to a large audience and likely to 

 attract popular attention. Sir Oliver 

 Lodge, who presided over the Birming- 

 ham meeting, was no exception. He is 

 known for his original investigations 

 in experimental physics and at the same 

 time for his wide-reaching speculations. 

 His address combined a statement of 

 recent physical theories, likely to be of 

 interest even to those who can not fully 

 understand them, with some remarks on 

 vitalism and psychical research which 

 are sure to attract wide attention. 



Sir Oliver Lodge began his address, 

 which extended to some 20,000 words, 

 by stating that the characteristic of the 

 promising though perturbing period in 

 which we live is rapid progress com- 

 bined with fundamental scepticism. 

 The subject of his address was "Con- 

 tinuity." He said that the remark- 

 able feature of the present scientific 

 era is the discovery of various kinds of 

 atomism, but he urged that a belief in 

 ultimate continuity is essential to sci- 

 ence. The modern tendency is to em- 

 phasize the discontinuity or atomic 

 character of everything. Matter has 

 long been atomic and electricity has 

 proved itself to be atomic. The elec- 

 tron is a natural unit of negative elec- 

 tricity, and it may not be long before 

 the unit of positive electricity is also 

 found. Even magnetism is suspected 

 of being atomic and atomic theories of 

 the ether have been invented; biology 

 is said to be becoming atomic through 

 modern ideas on mutation and Men- 



delian heredity. Sir Oliver Lodge, how- 

 ever, states that he is himself an up- 

 holder of ultimate continuity and a firm 

 believer in the ether of space. The 

 ether is a universal connecting medium 

 which binds the universe together and 

 makes it a coherent whole instead of a 

 chaotic collection of independent frag- 

 ments. 



The lecturer then discussed the prin- 

 ciple of relativity which had its origin 

 in the famous experiment of two Amer- 

 ican physicists. Professor Michelson 

 and Professor Morley, concerning the 

 time taken by light to travel to and 

 fro independent of the motion of the 

 earth through space, from which such 

 remarkable conclusions have been de- 

 duced by Dr. Einstein and others. Sir 

 Oliver Lodge holds that the dependence 

 of inertia and shape on speed is a gen- 

 uine discovery, while the principle of 

 relativity seeks to replace these real 

 changes in matter by imaginary changes 

 in time. 



There is an emotional appeal in 

 words such as electricity, ether and 

 continuity, and this becomes even 

 greater when we pass to life, free-will 

 and immortality, with which Sir Oliver 

 Lodge deals in the second part of his 

 address. It will be remembered that 

 last year his predecessor in the presi- 

 dential chair, Professor Shafer, who is 

 now lecturing in America, defended the 

 mechanistic conception of living bodies. 

 Perhaps a physiologist is more com- 

 petent than a physicist to decide on 

 which side Ihe weight of the evidence 

 lies, and indeed in the course of his ad- 

 dress Sir Oliver Lodge warns us fre- 

 quently against negative generaliza- 

 tions. In the case of living beings he 

 holds, however, that life introduces an 

 incalculable element. The vagaries of 

 a fire or of a cyclone ought to be pre- 



