TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION G. 



Section G— MECHANICAL SCIENCE. 

 President of the Section — Sir F. J. Bramwell, LL.D., F.R.S., V.P.Inst.C.E. 



THURSDA T, A I G VST 23. 



The President delivered the following Address : — 



Ix a family of seven children there are two who are of paramount importance : 

 the eldest, at the one end of the scale, important, because he is the heir, the first- 

 born; and at the other end of the scale, the little Benjamin, important because he 

 is the last, the youngest, and the dearest. The position of little Benjamin is not, 

 perhaps, quite as honourable as that of the heir, and not, when the family breaks 

 up, by any means as good ; but while the family holds together, Benjamin receives 

 an amount of attention and consideration that does not fall to the lot of any one of 

 the intermediates, not even to the heir himself. But there is one risk about Benja- 

 min's position, a risk that cannot appertain to the post of the first-born ; little 

 Benjamin may be deposed by the advent of a lesser Benjamin than himself, whereas 

 the first-born becomes (if possible) still more the first-born for each addition to the 

 family. Perhaps some of you may say, Be it so ; but what has this to do with the 

 address of the President of Section G ? Those who make this inquiry, how r ever, 

 certainly have not present to their minds the change that has this year taken place. 

 Up to and including the South port meeting, Section G w T as the little Benjamin 

 among the seven sons of the B.A. (I will not waste your time by giving the name 

 of the Association in full, nor will I affront you by using an abbreviation winch- 

 is occasionally improperly applied), but at Montreal appears Section H, and G 

 becomes relegated among those uninteresting members of the family who are 

 neither the important head nor the cherished tail. I grieve for Benjamin, and I 

 think the present occasion an apt one for magnifying Section G. Apt for two 

 reasons: the foregoing one, that II has deposed it from its position; the other, that 

 we are meeting in Montreal — and in reference to this latter reason, let me ask, Is 

 it not the fact that to the labours of the men who have been, or are (or ought to 

 be) members of Section G is due the possibility of the meeting taking place on this 

 side of the Atlantic ? 



At our jubilee meeting at York, I called the attention of the Section to the 

 fact that in 1831, when the Association first met in that city, they arrived there 

 laboriously by the stage-coach, and that practically the Manchester and Liverpool, 

 the Stockton and Darlington, arid some few others, were the only railways then in 

 existence. I also called their attention to the fact that in 1831 there were but 

 very few steamers. I find the total number registered in the United Kingdom in 

 that year was only 447. If under this condition of things, the proposition had 

 been made in 1832 at Oxford, as it was made in 1882 at Southampton, that the next 

 meeting but one of the Association should take place in Montreal, the extreme 

 probability is that the proposer would have been safely lodged in a lunatic asylum, 

 for suggesting that that which might have involved a six-weeks' voyage out, and a 

 four-weeks' voyage back, could ever be seriously entertained. Further, to give 

 once more the hackneyed quotation, some few r years after this, i.e., in 1836, Dr. 

 Lardner established to his own satisfaction conclusively, that no vessel could ever 

 steam across the Atlantic the whole way. A striking instance of the mistakes 

 made by scientific speculation ; a branch of science widely differing in the value of 



