KDomledge & Seiendfie fleuis 



A MONTHLY JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 



Conducted by MAJOR B. BADEN-POWELL and E. S. GREW, M.A. 



SIXPENCE. 



Vol. I. No. 6. [NKW series.] SEPTEMBER, 1904. [s, ,!*;,",''';"' iVaii 1 



CONTENTS AND NOTICES.— S ee Page VII. 



THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION 



Presidentia^l Address. 

 SectionsLl Addresses. . 



One of the most interesting and most largely attended meet- 

 ings of the British Association during recent years began its 

 sessions at Cambridge on Wednesday, the 17th of August. 

 The unique position which Cambridge occupies in the history 

 of science, and the great part which she has played in its de- 

 velopment, joined to the attrac- 

 tions which an ancient Univer- 

 sity always extends to visitors, 

 drew a representative gathering 

 not only of British men of 

 science, but of distinguished 

 foreign physicists, zoologists, 

 biologists, and economists. The 

 Presidential address of the Right 

 Hon. A.J. Balfour was delivered 

 on Wednesday evening, and was 

 heard by an audience that was 

 as brilliant as it was crowded. 



The President, the Right Hon. 

 A. J. Balfour, said that the 

 meetings of the -Association had 

 been held for the most part in 

 crowded centres of population 

 where the surroundings never 

 permitted them to forget, were 

 such forgetfulness in any case 

 possible, how close was the tie 

 that bound modern science to 

 modern industry, and that was no 

 doubt as it should be ; the inter- 

 dependence of theory and prac- 

 tice could not be ignored without 

 inflicting injury on both, and he 

 was but a poor friend to either 

 who undervalued their mutual 

 co-operation. Yet, after all, since 

 the British Association existed 

 for the advancement of science, 

 it was well that now and again 

 the members should choose their 

 place of gathering in some spot 

 where science, rather than its 

 applications, knowledge not 

 utility, were the ends to which 

 research was primarily directed. 

 If that were the case, surely no 

 happier selection could have been made than the ([uiet courts of 

 that ancient university — for there, if anywhere, they trod the 

 classic ground of physical discovery. Unless he was led astray by 

 too partial an affection for the old university, there was nowhere 

 to be found in any corner of the world a spot with which had 

 been connected either their training in youth, or by the labours 



I'hiito. hij thf London Sti'ri'osrojnr t'o ] 



THE RIGHT HON. A. J. BALFOUR, M.P., President 



of their mature years, so many men eminent as the originators 

 of new and fruitful physical conceptions. He said nothing of 

 Bacon nor of Darwin, the Copernicus of biology, for his sub- 

 ject was not the contributions of Cambridge to the general 

 grosvth of scientific knowledge. He was concerned rather 



with the illustrious physicists who 

 had learned or taught within a 

 few hundred yards of that spot 

 — a line stretching from Newton 

 in the Seventeenth Century, 

 through Cavendish in the Kigh- 

 teenth, through ^'oung, Stokes, 

 and Maxwell in the Nineteenth, 

 through Kelvin — who embodied 

 an epoch in himself — down to 

 Rayleigh, Larmor, and the scien- 

 tific school centred in the Caven- 

 dish Laboratory, whose physical 

 speculation bade fair to render 

 the closing years of the old cen- 

 tury and the opening years of 

 the new as notable as the great- 

 est which had preceded them. 

 What was the task which the.se 

 physicists had set themselves to 

 accomplish ? Whither led their 

 •' new and fruitful conceptions ? " 

 Physics was often described as 

 the " discovery of the laws con- 

 necting phenomena." That was 

 a misleading expression, because 

 the phenomena investigated were 

 things that could not appear to 

 beings so poorly provided with 

 sense perception as ourselves. 

 Hut apart from the linguistic 

 error, was it not also inaccurate 

 to say that a knowledge of 

 Nature's laws was all we sought 

 when investigating .Nature ? The 

 physicist sought for something 

 deeper than the laws connecting 

 possible objects of experience. 

 His object was physical reality, 

 which might or might not be 

 capable of direct perception 

 — a reality which was in any case independent of it ; a 

 reality which constituted the permanent mechanism of that 

 physical universe witli which our empirical connection was so 

 slight and so deceptive. If, then, one of the tasks of science, 

 and more particularly of physics, was to frame a conception 

 of the physical universe in its inner reality, then any attempt 



