ii6 



NA TURE 



\_Dec. 3, 1885 



founded is poverty. Such, however, I understand to be the case. 

 The Central Institution requires an assured income of at least 

 15,000/. a year if it is toiwork properly ; but the joint resources 

 of the City and Guilds of London, at present, appear to be able 

 to afford it only a precarious, annually-voted, subsidy of 9000/. 

 a year — far less, that is to say, than the private income of scores 

 of individual Londoners. In Germany, a similar institution 

 would demand and receive 20,000/. a year as a matter of course ; 

 but Englishmen are famous for that which a perplexed Chan- 

 cellor of the Exchequer (I think it was) once called their 

 "ignorant impatience of taxation," and there is no occasion on 

 which they so readily display that form of impatience as when 

 they are asked for money for education, especially scientific 

 education. I am bound to add, however, that my experience 

 on the Council and Committees of the Institute has left no doubt 

 on my mind that my colleagues have every desire to carry out 

 the work they have commenced thoroughly ; and that the money 

 difficulty will disappear along with certain other difficulties 

 which, I am disposed to think, need never have arisen. 



Such are the chief matters of business, if I may so call them, 

 which it is proper for me, in my Presidential capacity, to bring 

 before the Society. But it has been not unusual, of late years, 

 for the occupant of the Chair to'offer some observations of a wider 

 bearing for the consideration of the Society ; and I am the more 

 tempted to trespass upon your patience for this purpose, as it is 

 the last occasion on which I shall be able to use, or abuse, the 

 President's privileges. 



So far as my own observations, with respect to some parts of 

 the field of natural knowledge, and common report, with respect 

 to others, enable me to form an opinion, the past year exhibits 

 no slackening in the accelerated speed with which the physical 

 sciences have been growing, alike in extent and in depth, during 

 several decades. We are now so accustomed to this "unhasting 

 but unresting " march of physical investigation ; it has become 

 so much a part of the customary course of events, that, with 

 every day, I might almost say with every hour, something should 

 be added to our store of information respecting the constitution 

 of nature, some new insight into the order of the cosmos should 

 be gained, that you would probably listen with incredulity to 

 any account of the year's work which could not be summed up 

 in this commonplace of Presidential addresses. 



Nor shall I be chargeable with innovation if I add that there 

 is no reason to suspect that the future will bring with it any re- 

 tardation in the advance of science. The adverse influences, 

 which, in the middle ages, arrested the work commenced by the 

 older Greek philosophers, are so much weakened that they no 

 longer offer any serious obstacle to the growth of natural know- 

 ledge ; while they are powerless to prevent the extension of 

 scientific methods of inquiry and the application of scientific 

 conceptions to all the problems with which the human mind is 

 confronted. If any prophecy is safe of fulfilment, it is that, in 

 the twentieth century, the influence of these methods and con- 

 ceptions will be incomparably greater than it is now ; and that 

 the inter-penetration of science with the common affairs of life, 

 which is so marked a feature of our time, will be immeasurably 

 closer. For good or for evil, we have passed into a new epoch 

 of human history — the age of science. 



It may seem superfluous that I should adduce evidence in sup- 

 port of propositions which must have so much of the nature of 

 truisms to you who are sharers in the work of science and daily 

 witnesses of the effects of its productive energy. But the pro- 

 verbial tendency of familiarity to be incompatible with due 

 respect is noticeable even in our appreciation of the most 

 important truths, and our strongest convictions need furbishing 

 up now and then, if they are to ret.am their proper influence. I 

 certainly cannot accuse myself of ever having consciously enter- 

 tained a low estimate of the past work or the future progress of 

 science ; but, a few months ago, enforced leisure and the attain- 

 ment of an age when retrospection tends to become a habit, not 

 to say a foible, led me to look at the facts anew ; and I must 

 confess that the spectacle of the marvellous development of 

 science, alike in theory and practice, within my own life-time, 

 appeared to me to justify a faith, even more robust than juine, in 

 its future greatness. 



For, if I do not greatly err, the greater part of the vast body 

 of knowledge which constitutes the modern sciences of ]'hysics, 

 chemistry, biology, and geology, has been acquired, and the 

 widest generalisations therefrom have been deduced, within the 

 last sixty .years ; and, furthermore, the majority of those applica- 

 tions of scientific knowledge to practical ends, which have brought 



about the most striking differences between our present civilisa- 

 tion and that of antiqttity, have been made within that period 

 of time. 



To begin with the latter point — the practical achievements of 

 science. The first railway for locomotives, which was con- 

 stracted between .Stockton and Darlington, was opened in 

 September, 1825, so that I have the doubtful advantage of about 

 four months' seniority over the ancestral representative of the 

 vast reticulated fetching and carrying organism which now ex- 

 tends its meshes over the civilised world. I confess it fills me 

 with astonishment to think that the time when no man could 

 travel faster than horses could transport him, when our means of 

 locomotion were no better than those of Achilles or of Ramses 

 Maimun, lies within my memory. The electric telegraph, as a 

 thing for practical u^e, is far my junior. So are arms of pre- 

 cision, unless the old rifle be regarded as such. Again, the 

 application to hygiene, and to the medical and surgical treatment 

 of men and animals, of our knowledge of the phenomena of 

 parasitism, and the very discovery of the true order of these 

 phenomena, is a long way within the compass of my personal 

 knowledge. 



It is unnecessary for me to enumerate more- than these four 

 of the many rich gifts made by science to mankind during the 

 last sixty years. Arresting the survey here, I would ask if there 

 is any corresponding period in previous history which can tal<e 

 credit for so many momentous applications of scientific know- 

 ledge to the wants of mankind ? Depredators of the value of 

 natural knowledge are wont to speak somewhat scornfully of 

 these and such-like benefactions as mere additions to material 

 welfare. I must own to the weakness of believing that material 

 welfare is highly desirable in itself, .and I have yet to meet with 

 the man who prefers material illfare. But even if this should 

 be, as some may say, painful evidence of the materialistic 

 tendencies incidental to scientific pursuits, it is surely possible, 

 without much ingenuity, or .any prejudice in favour of one or 

 other view of the mutual relations of material and spiritual phe- 

 nomena, to show that each of these four applications of science 

 has exerted a prodigious influence on the moral, social, and 

 political relations of mankind, and that such influence can only 

 increase as time goes on. 



If the senseless antipathies, barn of isolation, which formerly 

 converted neighbours, whether they belonged to adjacent familie; 

 or to adjacent nations, into natural enemies, are dying away, im- 

 proved means of communication deserve the chief credit of the 

 change ; if war becomes less frequent, it will be chiefly because 

 its horrors are being intensified beyond bearing by the close 

 interdependence and community of interest thus est.ablished 

 between nations, no less than by the improvement of the means 

 of destruction by scientific invention. Arms of precision have 

 taken the mastery of the world out of the hands of brute force 

 and given it into those of industry and intelligence. If railways 

 and electric telegraphs have rendered it unnecessary that modern 

 empires should fall to pieces by their own weight as ancient 

 empires did, arms of precision have provided against the possi- 

 bility of their being swept away by barbarous invasions. 

 Health means not merely wealth, not merely bodily welfare, but 

 intellectual and moral soundness ; and I doubt if, since the time 

 of the father of medicine, any discovery has contributed so much 

 to the promotion of health .and the cure of disease as that of the 

 part played by fungoid parasites in the animal economy, and that 

 of the means of checking them, even though, as yet, unfortun- 

 ately it be only in a few cases. 



But though these practical results of scientific work, during 

 only two generations, are calculated to impress the imagination, 

 the Fellows of this Society know well enough that they are of 

 vastly less real importance than the additions which have been 

 made to fact and theory and serviceable hypothesis in the region 

 of pure science. But it is exactly in these respects that the 

 record of the past half century is so exceptionally brilliant. It 

 is sometimes said that our time is a day of small things — in 

 science it has been a day of the greatest things, for, within this 

 time, falls the establishment, on a safe basis, of the greatest of 

 all the generalisations of science, the doctrines of the Conserva- 

 tion of Energy and of Evolution. 



As for work of less wide scope, I speak in the hearing of 

 those who can correct me if I am wrong, when I say that the 

 larger moiety of our present knowledge of light, heat, electricity, 

 and magnetism, has been acquired within the time to which I 

 refer ; and that our present chemistry has been in great part 

 created, while the whole science has been remodelled from 



