202 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



its name may always be depended upon as being guaranteed 

 by test. In sanitary appliances, and in a hundred other 

 ways, chemistry has been increasingly improving its pro- 

 cesses and consequently its usefulness. 



Fifty years ago and still more recently, geology was not 

 recognised as a science. Now it has its endowed chairs in 

 our universities and is one of the most lively and progressive 

 of the whole circle of the sciences. In anatomy and physiology, 

 and in zoology and botany, great improvements have taken 

 place in physiological as well as morphological treatment. 



The higher mathematics, too, have attained an excellence 

 and completeness never before attained. The formulae, 

 instead of, as in former times, being simply ingenious calculi, 

 marks of exalted scholarship, have now become of the highest 

 practical utility, being, so to speak, the bones and sinews, the 

 very life blood of most of the sciences. 



As regards instruments auxiliary to science, I desire to 

 say a word in reference to one of them only, viz., the micro- 

 scope. A hundred years ago the microscope was only a toy, 

 now it is a most invaluable scientific instrument. Its range 

 of usefulness comprehends the whole world of matter, organic 

 and inorganic. In the examination of animal and vegetable 

 tissues it is indispensable. In chemical testing, in many 

 cases, it is equally so. The revelations exhibited to us in the 

 microscopical journals, and the experts themselves who make 

 the observations, are equally the objects and subjects of our 

 continual wonderment and admiration. An unseen world, in 

 all the beauty and glory of minute and perfect development, 

 has been vouchsafed to human knowledge by the possession 

 of this instrument. The service rendered and to be rendered 

 to science by it can never be properly calculated. 



As to other kinds of aids to advanced science — co-opera- 

 tive aids I may call them — I shall say a few words. I 

 mention first the British Association for the Advancement 

 of Science. Many have no kind words to say of it, but 

 there can be no doubt it is and has been most useful in 

 m^any ways. It is a gathering of learned men (and within 

 a parenthesis also some unlearned) from all parts of the earth 

 to hold council together on scientific subjects. On the 



