86G REPORT — 1900. 



And ia tho words of Tennyson we may say — 



Yet I doubt not, through the ages one increasing purpose runs, 

 And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. 



It is not my object to trace the advance of science in all its branches down to 

 the present time. 



I have above indicated the general lines along which the human mind has 

 advanced in laying the fouudations of our modern views ; but so intimately are we, 

 as engineers, connected with all the sciences that I must just refer in the briefest 

 manner to the development of chemical science as it grew out of tlie teaching of 

 Aristotle and Galen, that there were four elements, to the acid and alkaline dis- 

 coveries of Sylvius, through the teaching of Geoffrey and Stahl of the phlogistic 

 theory. 



We then have the discovery of oxygen by Priestley, and fixed air by Black and 

 Cavendish, composition of water by Cavendish, Watt, and Lavoisier, followed by 

 Davy and Dalton, the latter of whom formed our present conception of the atomic 

 theory and the combination of the elements in their true proportions. 



Through Davy, Faraday, and Tyndall we gradually arrive at our electro- 

 chemical ideas of the present day. 



We last year had so lucid an exposition from Professor Fleming, at Dover, of 

 the march of progress in electrical science during the past century that it would 

 be presumption on my part to attempt to recapitulate even the names which 

 extend from William Gilbert, in the sixteenth century, down to the discoveries of 

 Hertz of the present day. But I may be permitted to point out that from the time 

 of Volta, Ampere, and Oersted the rapid progress which electrical science has made 

 has been due in no small measure to the manner in which its experiments have 

 been treated, on strictly mathematical lines, by the master minds of such men as 

 Maxwell and Kelvin, until at last we arrive at the demonstration, long foretold, 

 of the wave theory, which renders wireless telegraphy an accomplished fact. 



Light to the engineer has at all times been of supreme importance, and on the 

 chart we mav scan the names of those who have advanced our scientific knowledge 

 of it from Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, Gregory, Newton, up to Roemer who dis- 

 covered its velocity, then Halley, Herschel, and the illustrious Thomas Young who 

 revived and Fresnel who perfected the undulatory theory, until at last we come 

 to those mysterious Fraunhofer lines, previously noticed by Wollaston, interpreted 

 byBunsen and Kirchhoff in 1860, and applied as an aid to chemistry in the analyses 

 of terrestrial and celestial bodies. 



In the theory of heat we have the experiments of Cavendish and Priestley 

 investigated by Count Rumford, illustrated by Tyndall, and bearing fruit in 

 Joule's mechanical equivalent. 



Perhaps none of the allied sciences appears so distant from our own profession as 

 that of physiology. 



The discovery of Harvey gives us, however, a beautiful insight into animal 

 mechanics ; and the observations of Leeuwenhoek about the year 1700 first bring 

 us into contact with those minute organisms which he discovered by means of the 

 microscope, and which are now found to play so large a part in tlie economy of 

 nature. 



Up to within the last twenty years it was generally held that dead organic 

 matter, anima! and vegetable, could but, in the words of Shakespeare, 'lie in cold 

 obstruction and rot,' this process being assisted, it was assumed, by chemical 

 oxidation; and, until the researches of Pasteur and Koch, we were entirely ignorant 

 of the fact that nature had at her command countless millinns of organisms, 

 always reducing the effete products of animal and vegetable life back into simpler 

 elements. 



The tendency of later years has clearly been, whether we look at the links 

 which unite heat and work, chemistry with electricity and magnetisnj, and light 

 with boih, or physiology with chemistry, to obliterate those boundary lines which 

 we have been accustomed to regard as fixed, and from the time of the publication 



