September 3, 1908] 



NA TURE 



425 



The great engine of natural selection is taunted nowa- 

 days, as it was fifty years ago, with being merely a 

 negative power. I venture to think that the mneniic hypo- 

 thesis of evolution makes the positive value of natural 

 selection more obvious. If evolution is a process of 

 drilling organisms into habits, the elimination of those that 

 cannot learn is an integral part of the process, and is no 

 less real because it is carried out by a self-acting system. 

 It is surely a positive gain to the harmony of the universe 

 that the discordant strings should break. But natural 

 selection does more than this ; and just as a trainer insists 

 on his performing dogs accommodating themselves to con- 

 ditions of increasing complexity, so does natural selection 

 pass on its pupils from one set of conditions to other and 

 more elaborate tests, insisting that they shall endlessly 

 repeat what they have learned and forcing them to learn 

 something new. Natural selection attains in a blind, 

 mechanical way the ends gained by a human breeder ; and 

 by an extension of the same metaphor it may be said to 

 have the power of a trainer — of an automatic master with 

 endless patience and all time at his disposal. 



SECTION A. 



MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICS. 



Opening Address by W. N. Shaw, Sc.D., LL.D., F.R.S., 



President of the Section. 

 It is with much misgiving that I endeavour to discharge 

 the traditional duty of the President of a Section of the 

 British Association. So many other duties seem to find a 

 natural resting-place with anyone who has to reckon at 

 the same time with the immediate requirements of the 

 public, the claims of scientific opinion, and the interests 

 of posterity, that, unless you are content with such con- 

 tribution towards the advancement of the sciences of 

 mathematics and physics as my daily experience enables 

 me to offer you, I shall find the task impossible. 



With a leaning towards periodicity perhaps slightly un- 

 orthodox I have looked back to see what they were doing 

 in Section A fifty years ago. Richard Owen was Presi- 

 dent of the Association, William Whewell was President 

 of Section A for the fifth time. 



At the meeting of 1858 they must have spent some time 

 over nineteen very substantial reports on researches in 

 science, which included a large section of Mallett's facts 

 and theory of earthquake phenomena, magnetic surveys of 

 Great Britain and of Ireland, and, oddly enough, an 

 account of the self-recording anemometer by Beckley ; 

 perhaps a longer time was required for fifty-seven Papers 

 contributed to the Section, but very little was spent over 

 the Presidential Address, for it only occupies two pages of 

 print. My inclination towards periodicities and another 

 consideration lead me to regard the precedent as a good 

 one. That other consideration is that Section A has always 

 more subjects for discussion than it can properly dispose 

 of; and, in this case, discipline, like charity, might begin 

 at home. 



Since the Section met last year it has lost its most 

 illustrious member and its most faithful friend. Lord 

 Kelvin made his first contribution to Section A at Cam- 

 bridge in 1845, on the elementary laws of statical elec- 

 tricity ; he was President of the Section in 1852 at Belfast 

 for the first of five times. I have looked to see what 

 suggestion I could derive from his first essay in that 

 capacity. I can find no reference to any Address in the 

 published volume. I wish I had the courage to follow that 

 great example. 



Lord Kelvin's association with Section A was so constant 

 and so intimate that it requires more than a passing word 

 of reference. There is probably no student of Mathematics 

 or Physics grown into a position of responsibility in this 

 country but keeps among his treasured reminiscences some 

 words of inspiration and of encouragement from Kelvin, 

 spoken in the surroundings which we are once more met 

 to inaugurate. I refer to those unrecorded acts of kind- 

 ness and help because they were really a striking character- 

 istic of Section A. Their value for the amenity as well 

 as for the advancement of science it would be difficult to 

 overestimate. I could not, even if time permitted, hope 



NO. 2027, VOL. 78] 



to set before you an adequate appreciation of Kelvin's 

 contributions to Science as illustrated by his communica- 

 tions to this Section, and in this place it is not necessary. 

 But 1 cannot pass over that feature of his character with- 

 out notice. 



Closely following on the loss of Kelvin came the death 

 of Sir Richard Strachey, a personal loss to which it is 

 diflicult to give expression. 1 am not aware that he had 

 much to do with Section A. I wish, indeed, that the 

 Section had seen its way to bring him more closely into 

 touch with its proceedings. He was President of Section E 

 in 1875, and, by appointment of the Royal Society, he was 

 for twenty-two years Chairman of the Meteorological 

 Council. I had the good fortune to be very closely 

 associated with him during the last ten years of his life, 

 and to realise the ideas which lay behind his official actions 

 and to appreciate the reality of his services to science in 

 the past and for the future. 



These losses unfortunately do not stand alone. Only 

 last year Sir John Eliot received the congratulations of 

 all his fellow-workers upon the publication of his Climato- 

 logical Atlas of India as representing the most conspicuous 

 achievement of orderly, deliberate, purposeful compilation 

 of meteorological facts for a special area that has yet been 

 seen. He was full of projects for a handbook to accom- 

 pany the atlas, and of ideas for the prosecution of meteor- 

 ological research over wide areas by collecting information 

 from all the world and enlisting the active cooperation of 

 the constituent parts of the British Empire in using those 

 observations for the advancement of science and the benefit 

 of mankind. He died quite suddenly on March 18, not 

 young as years go, but quite youthful in the deliberate 

 purpose of manifold scientific activities and in his 

 irrepressible faith in the future of the science which he has 

 adorned. 



The Section will, I hope, forgive me if I put before them 

 some considerations which the careers of these three men 

 suggest. Kelvin, a mathematician, a natural philosopher, 

 a University Professor, some part of whose scientific work 

 is known to each one of us. He was possessed with the 

 notion that Mathematics and Natural Philosophy are 

 applicable in every part of the work of daily life, and made 

 good the contention by presenting to the world, besides 

 innumerable theoretical papers, instruments of all degrees 

 of complexity, from the harmonic analyser to an improved 

 water-tap. It was he who transfigured and transformed 

 the mariner's compass and the lead-line into instruments 

 which have been of the greatest practical service. It was 

 he who, when experimental science was merely a collec- 

 tion of facts or generalisations, conceived the idea of trans- 

 figuring every branch of it by the application of the prin- 

 ciples of natural philosophy, as Newton had transfigured 

 astronomy. The ambition of Thomson and Tail's 

 " Natural Philosophy," of which only the first volume 

 reached the stage of publication, is a fair index of Kelvin's 

 genius. 



Strachey, on the other hand, by profession a military 

 engineer, a great administrator, head of the Public Works 

 Department in India, deeply versed in finance and in all the 

 other constituent parts of administration, by his own 

 natural instinct demanded the assistance of science for 

 every branch of administration. In promoting the develop- 

 ment of botany, of meteorology, of geodesy, and of mathe- 

 matics, he was not administering the patronage of a 

 Macaenas, but claiming the practical service of science in 

 forestry, in agriculture, in famine relief, in public works, 

 and in finance. You cannot gauge Strachey 's services to 

 science by the papers which he contributed to scientific 

 societies, if you leave out of account the fact that they 

 were really incidents in the opening of fresh channels of 

 communication between scientific work and the public 

 service. 



.And Eliot, as Meteorological Reporter to the Government 

 of India, an accomplished mathematician (for he was second 

 wrangler and first Smith's prizeman in i86q), a capable 

 and devoted public servant, the medium by which Strachey's 

 ideas as regards the use of meteorology in administration 

 found expression in the Government of India, who caught 

 the true perception of the place of science in the service 

 of the State, and made his office the indispensable hand- 

 maid of the Indian administration. These three men 



