September io, 1903] 



NA TURE 



439 



Inaugural Address by Sir Norman Lockyer, K.C.B., 



LL.D., F.R.S., CORRESPONDANT DE l'INSTITUT DE 



France, President of the Association. 

 The Influence of Brain-power on History. 

 My first duty to-night is a sad one. I have to refer to a 

 great loss which this Nation and this Association have sus- 

 tained. By the death of the great Englishman and great 

 statesman who has just passed away, we members of the British 

 Association are deprived of one of the most illustrious of our 

 confreres. We have to mourn the loss of an enthusiastic student 

 of science who conferred honour on our body by becoming its 

 President. VVe recognise that as Prime Minister he was mindful 

 of the interests of science, and that to him we owe a more general 

 recognition on the part of the State of the value to the nation of 

 the work of scientific men. On all these grounds you will join 

 in the expression of respectful sympathy with Lord Salisbury's 

 family in their great personal loss which your council has 

 embodied this morning in a resolution of condolence. 



Last year, when this friend of science ceased to be Prime 

 Minister, he was succeeded by another statesman who also 

 has given many proofs of his devotion to 'philosophical studies, 

 and has shown in many utterances that he has a clear under- 

 standing of the real place of science in modern civilisation. 

 We then have good grounds for hoping that the improvement in 

 the position of science in this country which we owe to the one 

 will also be the care of his successor, who has honoured the 

 Association by accepting the unanimous nomination of your 

 council to be your President next year, an acceptance which 

 adds a new lustre to this chair. 



On this we may congratulate ourselves all the more because 

 I think, although it is not generally recognised, that the century 

 into which we have now well entered may be more momentous 

 than any which has preceded it, and that the present history 

 of the world is being so largely moulded by the influence of brain- 

 power, which in these modern days has to do with natural as well 

 as human forces and laws, that statesmen and politicians will have 

 in the future to pay more regard to education and science, as 

 empire-builders and empire-guarders, than they have paid in 

 the past. 



The nineteenth century will ever be known as the one in 

 which the influences of science were first fully realised in 

 civilised communities ; the scientific progress was so gigantic 

 that it seems rash to predict that any of its successors can be 

 more important in the life of any nation. 



Disraeli, in 1873, referring to the progress up to that year, 

 spoke as follows : — " How much has happened in these fifty 

 years — a period more remarkable than any, I will venture to 

 say, in the annals of mankind. I am not thinking of the rise 

 and fall ot Empires, the change of dynasties, the establishment 

 of Governments. I am thinking of those revolutions of science 

 which have had much more etfect than any political causes, 

 which have changed the position and prospects of mankind more 

 than all the conquests and all the codes and all the legislators 

 that ever lived." ^ 



The progress of science, indeed, brings in many considerations 

 which are momentous in relation to the life of any limited 

 community — any one nation. One of these considerations 

 to which attention is now being greatly drawn is that a relative 

 decline in national wealth derived from industries must follow a 

 relative neglect of scientific education. 



It was the late Prince Consort who first emphasised this when 

 he came here fresh from the University of Bonn. Hence the 

 " Prince Consort's Committee," which led to the foundation of 

 the College of Chemistry and afterwards of the Science and Art 

 Department. From that time to this the warnings of our 

 men of science have become louder and more urgent in each 

 succeeding year. But this is not all ; the commercial output 

 of one country in one century as compared with another is 

 not alone in question ; the acquirement of the scientific spirit 

 and a knowledge and utilisation of the forces of Nature are 

 very much further reaching in their effects on the progress and 

 decline of nations than is generally imagined. 



Britain in the middle of the last century was certainly the 

 country which gained most by the advent of science, for she was 

 then in full possession of those material gifts of Nature, coal 

 and iron, the combined winning and utilisation of which, in the 

 pioduction of machinery and in other ways, soon made her the 

 richest country in the world, the seat and throne of invention 



' Nature, November 27, 1873, vol. 



NO. 1767, VOL. 68] 



p. 71 



and manufacture, as Mr. Carnegie has called her. Being the 

 great producers and exporters of all kinds of manufactured 

 goods, we became eventually, with our iron ships, the great 

 carriers, and hence the supremacy of our mercantile marine 

 and our present command of the sea. 



The most fundamental change wrought by the early applica- 

 tions of science was in relation to producing and carrying power. 

 With the winning of mineral wealth and the production of 

 machinery in other countries, and cheap and rapid transit 

 between nations, our superiority as depending upon our first use 

 of vast material resources was reduced. Science, which is above 

 all things cosmopolitan— planetary, not national— international- 

 ises such resources at once. In every market of the world 



" things of beauty, things of use, 

 Which one fair planet can produce, 

 Brought from under every star," 



were soon to be found. 



Hence the first great effect of the general progress of science 

 was relatively to diminish the initial supremacy of Britain due 

 to the first use of material resources, which indeed was the real 

 source of our national wealth and place among the nations. 



The unfortunate thing was that, while the foundations of our 

 superiority depending upon our material resources were being 

 thus sapped by a cause which was beyond our control, our 

 statesmen and our universities were blind leaders of the blind, 

 and our other asset, our mental resources, which was within 

 our control, was culpably neglected. 



So little did the bulk of our statesmen know of the part science 

 was playing in the modern world and of the real basis of the 

 nation's activities, that they imagined political and fiscal problems 

 to be the only matters of importance. Nor, indeed, are we 

 very much better off to-day. In the important discussions 

 recently raised by Mr. Chamberlain, next to nothing has been 

 said of the effect of the progress of science on prices. The 

 whole course of the modern world is attributed to the presence 

 or absence of luxes on certain commodities in certain countries. 

 The fact that the great fall in the price of food-stuffs in 

 England did not come till some thirty or forty years after the 

 removal of the corn duty between 1847 and 1849 gives them no 

 pause ; for them new inventions, railways and steamships are 

 negligible quantities ; the vast increase in the woild's wealth in 

 free trade and protected countries alike comes merely according 

 to them in response to some political shibboleth. 



We now know, from what has occurred in other States, that 

 if our Ministers had been more wise and our universities more 

 numerous and efficient, our mental resources would have been 

 developed by improvements in educational method, by the 

 introduction of science into schools, and, more important than 

 all the rest, by the teaching of science by experiment, observ- 

 ation and research, and not from books. It is because this was not 

 done that we have fallen behind other nations in properly apply- 

 ing science to industry, so that our applications of science to in- 

 dustry are relatively less important than they were. But this is 

 by no means all ; we have lacked the strengthening of the national 

 lile produced by fostering the scientific spirit among all classes, 

 and along all lines of the nation's activity ; many of the re- 

 sponsible authorities know little and care less about science ; we 

 have not learned that it is the duty of a State to organise its 

 forces as carefully for peace as for war ; that universities and other 

 teaching centres are as important as battleships or big battalions ; 

 are, in fact, essential parts of a modern State's machinery, and 

 as such to be equally aided and as efficiently organised to 

 secure its future well being. 



Now the objects of the British Association as laid down 

 by its founders seventy-two years ago are *' To give a 

 stronger impulse and a more systematic direction to scientific 

 inquiry — to promote the intercourse of those who cultivate 

 science indifferent parts of the British Empire with one another 

 and with foreign philosophers — to obtain a more general atten- 

 tion to the objects of science and a removal ol any disadvantages 

 of a public kind which impede its progress." 



In the main, my predecessors in this chair, to which you have 

 done me the honour to call me, have dealt, and wiih great benefit 

 to science, with the objects first named. 



But at a critical lime like the present I find it imperative to 

 depart from the course so generally followed by my predecessors 

 and to deal with the last object named, for unless by some 

 means or other we "obtain a more general attention to the 

 objects of science and a removal of any disadvantages of a 



