A2 
NALTURE 
[NOVEMBER 12, 1903 
comprehension of the present. After the past week, you 
will not need to be told in detail how, in every direction, 
the sciences, abstract, concrete, practical, are advancing 
by leaps and bounds. Progress is the condition, it is the 
essence, of living knowledge; it should be the very breath 
of life of the university. 
How is this progress to be secured, and the knowledge 
of it made available? It is manifestly the duty of the pro- 
fessors to assimilate new facts as they come, and to submit 
them to those critical refining and concentrating processes 
which make the surviving product some contribution to 
truth. But is there to be nothing else on the part of the 
professors? Is it to be ‘‘ all take and no give ’’? all absorp- 
tion and no production? Are they to profit by taking toll 
of all the thought of the world, and to contribute nothing 
for toll in return? I hold it to be the highest duty of a 
teaching professor that, up to the limits of his powers, he 
should strive to contribute to the increase of knowledge 
and the advancement of truth. 
Now I know that all professorial spirit is not the same 
spirit. There is a spirit which devotes itself to administra- 
tion; its works deserve grateful acknowledgment, and they 
are undoubtedly indued with the exercise of power, so dear 
to many souls. There is a spirit which devotes itself to the 
humanising and social influences that should be a feature 
in the life of a university; its labours are blest in a 
quickened vitality that affects the whole community. But 
the spirit of research must also be there; not alone the 
quest of facts, but the quest of truth, which is higher than 
facts; not alone the love of novel thought, but the love of 
wisdom, which is the crown of thought. You cannot secure 
it by regulations ; a professor will devote himself to research 
in proportion as he likes it, not because it is an expected 
duty. You cannot exact it from every professor; but there 
must be a substantial amount of research produced by the 
aggregate of professors, or their corporation will fail to 
contribute its share to the advancement of learning. More- 
over, in the absence of research, the university will fail 
in other respects, for it will be unable to exercise the pro- 
foundest of all influences upon the most earnest of its 
students whose later duty it will be to carry on the torch 
of learning—I mean the influence of stimulus and_ in- 
spiration. 
Will you let me be reminiscent for a few moments? 
When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge studying 
mathematics in all the earnest and kindly rivalry that is 
frankly and easily possible among young men who are 
friends, there was, among the professors, a group of four 
men of supreme eminence, Stokes, Cayley, Adams, and 
Maxwell. We were not (or we thought we were not) 
sufficiently qualified by our attainments to attend their 
lectures in our earliest days; but our teachers could tell 
us of their powers, their genius, something of what they 
had done or were doing, and we knew that they stood 
among the great men of the world. Do you think it was 
a little thing to young men at the opening of life that they 
belonged to a university which possessed such illustrious 
pioneers of learning?. I can tell you that, though the 
young men then knew themselves hardly worthy of entrance 
even into the court of the Gentiles in the temple of new 
knowledge, the mere presence of the great men stimulated 
them and inspired them along the paths which led to the 
temple. I have spoken of one group of professors, great 
men in the domain of knowledge that was our special 
pursuit; I would mention another group of professors 
possessed by Cambridge at that time, equally great in 
another domain, that of theology. They were Lightfoot, 
Westcott, Hort. To theological students I suppose that 
they stood for as much as did the mathematical group to 
us; but even to those of us who were not theological 
students their achievements made the university a more 
stimulating home of study, though we knew nothing in 
detail of their work. All these men are dead, the oldest 
of them all only a few months ago; their bodies are buried 
in peace, but their names live for evermore, a treasured 
inheritance and the proud possession of the university of 
which during their lives they were an ornament, a glory, 
and an inspiration. 
This deviation into personal reminiscence is undoubtedly 
an interruption of my main line of argument. Yet these 
particular examples of fact may do more than any ordered 
NO. 1776, VOL. 69] 
sequence of reasons could do for the establishment of my 
contention that a healthy university must contribute not 
merely to the diffusion of knowledge, but also to the 
advancement of learning. 
ConcLupING REMARKS. 
I have spoken at length of some of the aspects of universi- 
ties, and have incidentally alluded to others, and some 
have been omitted entirely. It is time, however, that my 
remarks should draw to a close, and so I leave the subject 
with you at this stage. Earlier in the evening I confessed 
that the receipt of the charters of the Universities of Man- 
chester and of Liverpool suggested my subject. But the 
real reason for its selection was a desire on my part to 
do something by way of concentrating your thoughts, and, 
through you, the thoughts of others, upon the significance 
of university education, for I believe that a vigorous uni- 
versity can exercise a most beneficent influence upon the 
life of a nation. It certainly can play its part in so train- 
ing men that they can contribute to the commercial succe$s 
and the material welfare of the people among whom it is 
placed. But it can do more. The greatness of a people 
is not to be measured solely or even mainly by its com- 
mercial success, or the extent of its empire, or the vigour 
of its fighting powers. Thought has its part in life, no 
less than action; frequently it dominates action; often it is 
more potent than action in its influence upon the course 
of civilisation. In estimating the position of a nation in 
the scale of the world, not a little weight ultimately is 
attached to its devotion to learning. The spread of learn- 
ing makes for the clearer understanding of the nations by 
one another, and consequently assists towards developing 
feelings of comity and invoking the spirit of peace. 
Universities can do much as agents in the achievement of 
these aims as of others that are more utilitarian. They 
give to their people a wider range of knowledge and a 
higher standard of culture, and they can organise the genius 
and the ability of a nation so as to feed the living springs 
of action and enable it to make no unworthy contribution 
to the growing thought of the world. | 
ASTRONOMY AND METEOROLOGY AT THE 
BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 
op HE proceedings of the department of Section A which 
was devoted to astronomy and meteorology were con- 
spicuous this year on account of the meeting of the Inter- 
national Meteorological Committee, which was held during 
the Association week, and brought to Southport not 
only representative meteorologists from the United States, 
France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Sweden, Norway, Den- 
mark, Holland, and the Azores, but also a very notable 
gathering of British meteorologists. The muster at the 
meteorological breakfast, which was organised by Dr. H. R. 
Mill, was not less than sixty-two. 
International Committee Meetings. 
The meetings of the International Committee, under the 
presidency of Prof. Mascart, and of the Subcommittee for 
International Telegraphy, under the presidency of Prof. 
Pernter, were so arranged that the members could attend 
the meetings of the department. Several of them made 
communications to the section and took part in the dis- 
cussions. The variety of language added to the interest of 
the proceedings, which were in gratifying contrast with the 
rather depressing occasions represented by the meteorology 
days as they used to be before the formation of a special 
subsection for cosmical physics. 
Before going on to the work of the subsection, a word 
or two may be said about the work of the International 
Committees. First, for the subcommittee on weather tele- 
graphy: its duty is to consider all matters which concern 
the efficiency of the arrangements for daily weather maps. 
In Europe these arrangements are of the most complicated 
character, and require the cooperation not only of a number 
of independent meteorological services, but also of an equal 
number of independent telegraphic services bringing 
messages, not as a rule from the centres of business, but 
from the most remote and exposed positions on the European 
coasts to the various central offices. The relations between 
