464 
NATURE 
[SEPTEMBER 14, 1899 
INAUGURAL ADDRESS BY PROF. SiR MICHAEL FOSTER, 
K.C.B., Sec.R.S., PRESIDENT OF THE ASSOCIATION. 
He who until a few minutes ago was your President said 
somewhere at the meeting at Bristol, and said with truth, that 
among the qualifications needed for the high honour of Presidency 
of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, that 
of being old was becoming more and more dominant. He who 
is now attempting to speak to you feels that he is rapidly earn- 
ing that distinction, But the Association itself is older than its 
President ; it has seen pass away the men who, wise in their 
generation, met at York on September 27, 1831, to found it : 
it has seen other great men who in bygone years served it as 
Presidents, or otherwise helped it on, sink one after another 
into the grave. Each year, indeed, when it plants its flag asa 
signal of its yearly meeting, that flag floats half-mast high in token 
of the great losses which the passing year has brought. This 
year is no exception ; the losses, indeed, are perhaps unwontedly 
heavy. I will not attempt to call over the sad roll-call ; but I 
must say a word about one who was above most others 
a faithful and zealous friend of the Association, Sir Douglas 
Galton joined the Association in 1860. From 1871 to 1895, as 
one of the General Secretaries, he bore, and bore to the great 
good of the Association, a large share of the burden of the 
Association’s work. How great that share was is perhaps 
especially known to the many men, among whom I am proud 
to count myself, who during his long term of office served in 
succession with him as brother General Secretary. In 1895, at 
Ipswich, he left the post of General Secretary, but only to 
become President. So long and so constantly did he labour for 
the good of the Association that he seemed to be an integral 
part of it, and meeting as we do to-day, and as we hence- 
forward must do, without Douglas Galton, we feel something 
greatly missing. This year, perhaps even more than in other 
years, we could have wished him tobe among us; for 
to-day the Association may look with joy, not unmixed 
with pride, on the realisation of a project in forwarding 
which it has had a conspicuous share, on the com- 
mencement of an undertaking which is not only a great 
thing in itself, but which, we trust, is the beginning of still 
greater things to come. And the share which the Association 
has had in this was largely Sir Douglas Galton’s doing. In his 
Address as President of Section A, at the meeting of the Asso- 
ciation at Cardiff in 1891, Prof. Oliver Lodge expounded with 
pregnant words how urgently, not pure science only, but industry 
and the constructive arts—for the interests of these are ever at 
bottom the same—needed the aid of some national establishment 
for the prosecution of prolonged and costly physical researches, 
which private enterprise could carry out in a lame fashion only, 
ifat all. | Lodge’s words found an echo in many men’s minds ; 
but the response was fora long while in men’s minds only. In 
1895 Sir Douglas Galton, having previously made a personal 
study of an institution analogous to the one desired—namely, 
the Reichsanstalt at Berlin—seized the opportunity offered to 
him as President of the Association at Ipswich to insist, with 
the authority not only of the head for the time being of a great 
scientific body, but also of one who himself knew the ways and 
wants at once of science and of practical life, that the thing 
which Lodge and others had hoped for was a thing which could 
be done, and ought to be done at once. And now to-day we 
can say it has been done. The National Physical Laboratory 
has been founded. The Address at Ipswich marked ‘the be- 
ginning of an organised effort which has at last been crowned 
with success. A feeling of sadness cannot but come over us 
when we think that Sir Douglas Galton was not spared to see 
the formal completion of the scheme whose birth he did so much 
to help, and which, to his last days, he aided in more ways 
than one. It is the old story—the good which men do lives 
after them. 
Still older than the Association is this nineteenth century, 
now swiftly drawing to itsclose. Though the century itself has 
yet some sixteen months to run, this is the last meeting of the 
British Association which will use the numbers eighteen hundred 
to mark its date. 
The eyes of the young look ever forward; they take little 
heed of the short though ever-lengthening fragment of life 
which lies behind them; they are wholly bent on that which is 
tocome. The eyes of the aged turn wistfully again and again 
to the past; as the old glide down the inevitable slope their 
present becomes a living over again the life which has gone 
before, and the future takes on the shape of a brief lengthening 
NO. 1559, VOL. 60] 
o1 the past. May I this evening venture to give rein to the 
impulses of advancing years? May I, at this last meeting of 
the Association in the eighteen hundreds, dare to dwell for a 
while upon the past, and to call to mind a few of the changes 
which have taken place in the world since those autumn days in 
which men were saying to each other that the last of the 
seventeen hundreds was drawing towards its end ? 
Dover in the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and ninety- 
nine was in many ways unlike the Dover of to-day. On 
moonless nights men groped their way in its narrow streets by 
the help of swinging lanterns and smoky torches, for no lamps 
lit the ways. By day the light of the sun struggled into the 
houses through narrow panes of blurred glass. Though the 
town then, as now, was one of the chief portals to and from the 
countries beyond the seas, the means of travel were scanty and 
dear, available for the most part to the rich alone, and, for all, 
beset with discomfort and risk. Slow and uncertain was the 
carriage of goods, and the news of the world outside came to 
the town—though it from its position learnt more than most 
towns—tardily, fitfully, and often falsely, The people of 
Dover sat then much in dimness, if not in darkness, and lived 
in large measure on themselves. They who study the pheno- 
mena of living beings tell us that light is the great stimulus of 
life and that the fulness of the life of a being or of any of its 
members may be measured by the variety, the swiftness, and 
the certainty of the means by which it is in touch with its 
surroundings. Judged from this standpoint then life at Dover, 
as indeed elsewhere, must have fallen far short of the life of 
to-day. 
The same study of living beings, however, teaches us that 
while from one point of view the environment seems to mould 
the organism, from another point the organism seems to be 
master of its environment. Going behind the change of cir- 
cumstances, we may raise the question, the old question, Was 
life in its essence worth more then than now? Has there been 
a real advance ? 
Let me at once relieve your minds by saying that I propose 
to leave this question in the main unanswered. It may be, or 
it may not be, that man’s grasp of the beautiful and of the 
good, if not looser, is not firmer than it was a hundred years 
ago. It may be, or it may not be, that man is no nearer to 
absolute truth, to seeing things as they really are, than he was 
then. I will merely ask you to consider with me for a few 
minutes how far, and in what ways, man’s laying hold of that 
aspect of or part of truth which we call natural knowledge, or 
sometimes science, differed in 1799 from what it is to-day, and 
whether that change must not be accounted a real advance, a 
real improvement in man. 
I do not propose to weary you by what in my hands would be 
the rash effort of attempting a survey of all the scientific results 
of the nineteenth century. It will be enough if for a little 
while I dwell on some few of the salient features distinguishing 
the way in which we nowadays look upon, and during the 
coming week shall speak of, the works of nature around us— 
though those works themselves, save for the slight shifting in- 
volved in a secular change, remain exactly the same—from the 
way in which they were looked upon and might have been 
spoken of at a gathering of philosophers at Dover in 1799. 
And I ask your leave to do so. 
In the philosophy of the ancients, earth, fire, air, and water 
were called ‘‘the elements.” It was thought, and rightly 
thought, that a knowledge of them and of their attributes was a 
necessary basis of a knowledge of the ways of nature. Trans- 
lated into modern language, a knowledge of these ‘‘ elements” 
of old means a knowledge of the composition of the atmosphere, 
of water, and of all the other things which we call matter, as 
well as a knowledge of the general properties of gases, liquids, 
and solids, and of the nature and effects of combustion. Of all 
these things our knowledge to-day is large and exact, and, 
though ever enlarging, in some respects complete. When did 
that knowledge begin to become exact ? 
To-day the children in our schools know that the air which 
wraps round the globe is not a single thing, but is made up of 
two things, oxygen and nitrogen,’ mingled together. They 
know, again, that water is not a single thing, but the product of 
two things, oxygen and hydrogen, joined together. They know 
that when the air makes the fire burn and gives the animal life, 
it is the oxygen in it which does the work. They know that all 
4 Some may already know that there is at least a third thing, argon. 
