September 5, 19 12] 



NATURE 



Inaugural Address by Prof. E. A. Schafer, LL D 

 D.Sc, M.D., F.R.S., President. 



Introductory. 



It is exactly forty-five years ago — to the day and 

 hour — that the British Association last met in this 

 city and in this hall to listen to a Presidential Address. 

 The President was the Duke of Buccleuch ; the General 

 Secretaries, Francis Galton and T. Archer Hirst ; the 

 General Treasurer, William Spottiswoode ; and the 

 Assistant General Secretary, George Griffith, who was 

 for many years a mainstay of the Association. The 

 Evening Discourses were delivered by John Tyndall 

 "On Matter and Force," by Archibald Geikie "On the 

 Geological Origin of the Scenery of Scotland," and by 

 Alexander Herschel " On the Present State of Knovv- 

 ledge regarding Meteors and Meteorites." The Presi- 

 dents of Sections, which were then only seven in 

 number, were for Mathematics and Physics, Sir 

 William Thomson — later to be known as Lord Kelvin ; 

 for Chemistry, Thomas Anderson ; for Geology, Archi- 

 bald Geikie, who now as President of the Royal Society 

 worthily fills the foremost place in science within the 

 realm ; for Biology, William Sharpey, my own revered 

 master, to whose teaching and influence British physio- 

 logy largely owes the honourable position which it at 

 present occupies ; for Geography, Sir Samuel Baker, 

 the African explorer, who with his intrepid wife was 

 the first to follow the Nile to its exit from the Albert 

 Nyanza ; for Economic Science, Mr. Grant Duff ; and 

 for Mechanical Science, Professor Rankine. 



Other eminent men present were Sir David Brewster, 

 J. Clerk Maxwell, Charles Wheatstone, Balfour 

 Stewart, William Crookes, J. B. Lawes and J. H. 

 Gilbert (names inseparable in the history of agricul- 

 tural science), Crum Brown, G. D. Liveing, W. H. 

 Russell, .Alexander Williamson, Henry .'\lleyne Nichol- 

 son, William .^llmann, John Hutton Balfour, Spencer 

 Cobbold, .^nton Dohrn, Sir John Lubbock (now Lord 

 Avebury), William Mcintosh, E. Ray Lankester, 

 C. W. Peach, William Pengelly, Hughes Bennett, 

 John Cleland, John Davy, .'\lexander Christison, Alfred 

 Russel W'allace, .\llen Thomson, William Turner, 

 George Busk, Michael Foster (not yet founder of the 

 Cambridge School of Phvsiology), Henry Howorth, 

 Sir Roderick Murchison, Clements R. Markham, Sir 

 William (afterwards Lord) Armstrong, and Douglas 

 Galton. Many of those enumerated have in the course 

 of nature passed awav from us, but not a few remain, 

 and we are glad to know that most of these retain 

 their ancient vigour in spite of the five-and-forty years 

 which separate us from the last meeting in this place. 



Selection of Subject of Address. 

 For the Address with which it is usual for the 

 President to open the proceedings of the annual 

 assembly, the field covered by the aims of the British 

 Association provides the widest possible range of 

 material from which to select. One condition alone is 

 prescribed by custom, viz., that the subject chosen shall 

 lie within the bounds of those branches of knowledge 

 which are dealt with in the Sections. There can be 

 no ground of complaint regarding this limitation on 

 the score of variety, for within the forty years that I 

 have myself been present (not, I regret to say, without 

 a break) at these gatherings, problems relating to thi> 

 highest mathematics on the one hand, and to the most 

 utilitarian applications of science on the other, with 

 every possible gradation between these extremes, have 

 been discussed before us bv successive Presidents ; and 

 the addition from time to time of new Sections (one of 

 which, that of Agriculture, we welcome at this Meet- 

 ing) enables the whilom occupant of this chair to 

 traverse paths which have not been previously trodden 

 by his predecessors. On the last two occasions, under 



NO. 2236, VOL. 90] 



the genial guidance of Profs. Bonney and Sir William 

 Ramsay, we have successively been taken in imagina- 

 tion to the glaciers which flow between the highest 

 peaks of the Alps and into the bowels of the earth ; 

 where we were invited to contemplate the prospective 

 disappearance of the material upon which all our in- 

 dustrial prosperity depends. Needless to say that the 

 lessons to be drawn from our visits to those unaccus- 

 tomed levels were placed before us with all the 

 eloquence with which these eminent representatives of 

 Geology and Chemistry are gifted. It is fortunately 

 not expected that I should be able to soar to such 

 heights or to plunge to such depths, for the branch of 

 science with which I am personally associated is merely 

 concerned with the investigation of the problems of 

 living beings, and I am able to invite you to remain 

 for an hour or so at the level of ordinary mortality to 

 consider certain questions which at any rate cannot 

 fail to have an immediate interest for everyone present, 

 seeing that they deal with the nature, origin, and 

 maintenance of life. 



Definition. 



Everybody knows, or thinks he knows, what life is ; 

 at least, we are all acquainted with its ordinary, 

 obvious manifestations. It would, therefore, seem that 

 it should not be difficult to find an exact definition. 

 The quest has nevertheless baffled the most acute 

 thinkers. Herbert Spencer devoted two chapters of 

 his " Principles of Biology " to the discussion of the 

 attempts at definition which had up to that date been 

 proposed, and himself suggested another. But at the 

 end of it all he is constrained to admit that no expres- 

 sion had been found which would embrace all the 

 known manifestations of animate, and at the same 

 time exclude those of admittedly inanimate, objects. 



The ordinary dictionary definition of life is "the 

 state of living." Dastre, following Claude Bernard, 

 defines it as " the sum total of the phenomena common 

 to all living beings." ' Both of these definitions are, 

 however, of the same character as Sydney Smith's 

 definition of an archdeacon as " a person who per- 

 forms archidiaconal functions." I am not myself 

 proposing to take up your time by attempting to 

 grapple with a task which has proved too great for 

 the intellectual giants of philosophy, and I have the 

 less disposition to do so because recent advances in 

 knowledge have suggested the probability that the 

 dividing line between animate and inanimate matter 

 is less sharp than it has hitherto been regarded, so 

 that the difficulty of finding an inclusive definition is 

 correspondingly increased. 



Life not Identical with Soul. 

 .\s a mere word "life" is interesting in the fact 

 that it is one of those abstract terms which has no 

 direct antithesis ; although probably most persons 

 would regard "death" in that light. .\ little con- 

 sideration will show that this is not the case. 

 "Death" implies the pre-existence of "life"; there 

 are physiological grounds for regarding death as a 

 phenomenon of life — it is the completion, the last act 

 of life. We cannot speak of a non-living object as 

 possessing death in the sense that we speak of a 

 living object as possessing life. The adjective " dead " 

 is, it is true, applied in a popular sense antithetically 

 to objects which have never possessed life; as in the 

 proverbial expression "as dead as a door-nail." But 

 in the strict sense such application is not justifiable, 

 since the use of the terms dead and living implies 

 cither in the past or in the present the possession of 

 the recognised properties of living matter. On the 

 other hand, the expressions living and lifeless, animate 

 and inanimate, furnish terms which are undoubtedly 



1 "La vie et la mort," English translation by W. J. Greenstreet, iQii, 



