SEPTEMBER 18, 1913] 
NATURE i3 
play together in the cultivated valleys, which con- 
tinues from generation to generation. 
Yes, and continues for ever! A universe which has 
the potentiality of becoming thus conscious of itself 
is not without something of which that which we call 
memory is but an image. Somewhere, somehow, in 
ways we dream not of, when you and I have merged 
again into the illimitable whole, when all that is 
material has ceased, the faculty in which we now have 
now dimly struggle to grasp, the joy we have in 
the effort, these are but part of a greater whole. 
Some may fear, ana sume may hope, that they and 
theirs shall not endure for ever. But he must have 
studied nature in vain who does not see that our 
spiritual activities are inherent in the mighty process 
of which we are part; who can doubt of their per- 
sistence. 
And, on the intellectual side, of all that is best ascer- 
tained, and surest, and most definite, of these; of all 
that is oldest and most universal; of all that is most 
fundamental and far-reaching, of these activities, pure 
mathematics is the symbol and the sum. 
SECTION B. 
CHEMISTRY. 
OPENING ADDRESS BY Pror. W. P. Wynne, D.Sc., 
F.R.S., PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
WHEN the present position of education in Birming- 
ham is considered, the transformation effected since 
the ’seventies is little short of marvellous. Five-and- 
thirty years ago, when I became an evening student, 
classes conducted by the Midland Institute met the 
demand for arts and science subjects; now a Univer- 
sity—venerable in comparison with all civic universi- 
ties save the Victoria University of Manchester—exists 
to provide instruction in every branch of learning. 
The spacious building in which we meet—already too 
small for the demands made on it—is the lineal 
descendant of that part of the Midland Institute which 
formerly was used for evening class instruction in 
science, organised in connection with the science and 
art department, and financed largely by the system 
of payment on results; this large lecture theatre re- 
places the small and inconvenient class-room in which 
the teaching of chemistry and physics under Mr. 
Woodward was carried on. Payment on results is 
obsolete, and the ‘‘May"’ examinations on which it 
was based have almost disappeared, assessment by 
inspection now replacing both; nevertheless, it is more 
than doubtful whether any other system—in the cir- 
cumstances of the time—could have spread so widely 
a knowledge of science among the people, or prepared 
the way for the Technical Instruction Act, and that 
appreciation of the value of scientific training for 
industrial pursuits, which is exemplified by the pro- 
vision through municipal agencies of technical schools 
in the industrial centres of this country. I sometimes 
think the Science and Art Department, and those great 
men, Sir John Donnelly and Prof. Huxley, who did 
much to shape its attitude towards science instruction 
in evening classes and in the science schools at South 
Kensington,! have received something less than their 
share of credit for pioneering work which finds its 
fruition in well-equipped institutions like this, and in 
the enhanced position which science holds to-day in 
the estimation of our countrymen. In those far-off 
times, before the foundation-stone of Mason College 
was laid, such evening classes in Birmingham pro- 
vided the only means by which instruction in science, 
or scholarships to South Kensington, could be 
1 These schools in 1881 became the Normal School of Science, and in 
1g0c the Royal College of Science, now incorporated in the Imperial College 
of Science and Technology. 
NO. 2290, VOL. 92] 
obtained. It is not unfitting, therefore, that I—a pro- 
duct of the system—should acknowledge here the 
obligation under which I stand both to the Midland 
Institute and to the Science and Art Department for 
providing the ladder by which I have risen, however 
undeservedly, to the honourable position of president 
of this section. 
The historian of our times will not fail to note 
: ; some of the consequences which have followed the 
some share, shall surely endure; the conceptions we | 
application of science to industry, possibly also some 
of the educational results which have followed the 
development of science teaching in schools of all 
grades. Except from one point of view these need not 
concern us now as they fall, the one in so far as 
chemistry is concerned, into the province of the Society 
of Chemical Industry, the other mainly within the 
purview of Section L. This bringing of chemistry 
to the people has aroused a widespread interest in 
some aspects of the subject, of which the Press has 
not been slow to take note. Not even the heuristic 
method can hide from the schoolboy the fact that 
certain fundamental conceptions are accepted which do 
not admit of proof, such as the indivisible atom, the 
non-decomposable element, the indestructibility of 
matter. When, therefore, as one of the first-fruits 
of his discovery that positive rays furnish the most 
delicate method of chemical analysis, Sir J. J. Thom- 
son has obtained from the most diverse solids a new 
gas, X,; and by a different procedure, Prof. Collie 
with Mr. Patterson have discovered that hydrogen, under 
the influence of electric discharges at low pressure, 
becomes replaced by neon, helium, and a third gas 
which is possibly identical with X,,? it is not surprising 
that we should hear much about it in the newspapers, 
just as was the case when the disintegration of 
radium was in process of being established. Further 
investigation may fail to substantiate some of the 
views which have been expressed about this unex- 
plained disappearance of hydrogen; the origin of the 
neon and helium which make their appearance in the 
| tube as the experiments proceed; the source of the 
gas X,. Fortunately, X,, unlike neon and helium, has 
some chemical properties—it disappears, for example, 
when violently exploded with a mixture of oxygen and 
hydrogen *—but we do not yet know whether it is a 
new element with an atomic weight of about 3, or a 
compound of hydrogen with an element yet to be 
discovered. This much at least seems certain: it is 
not the gas which, according to Mendeleef, should 
precede fluorine in the halogen series, but whether its 
discovery, like that of argon, will necessitate a revision 
of the periodic table of the elements we cannot know 
until the mystery which at present surrounds it has 
been dispelled. 
It was in 1886, at the last meeting of this associa- 
tion in Birmingham, that Sir William Crookes— 
whose continued activities are a source of pride and 
gratification to his brother chemists—gave that 
famous address in which, clothing his ideas in 
language which has something of the magic of word- 
painting, he traced the evolution of the elements, as 
we know them, from the hypothetical protyle or 
Urstoff. The common origin of all elementary sub- 
stances is now an accepted theory, although the ques- 
tion whether the idea underlying the term ‘“trans- 
mutation" is verifiable under available conditions is 
answered differently according to the view we take 
of the disintegration of radium and kindred pheno- 
mena. But no one could have imagined that before 
another Birmingham meeting, the periodic table to 
which Sir William Crooks devoted much attention 
would have been enriched not only by a series of 
2 J. N. Collie and H. S. Patterson, Trans. Chem. Soc., 1913, ciii., 419 ; 
Proc. Chem. Soc., 1913, xxix, 217. 
% Sir J. J. Thomson, Proc. Roy. Soc., 1913, Ixxxixa. 20, 
