4 REPORT — 1901. 



It is held in Glasgow at a time when your International Exhibition has 

 in a special sense attracted the attention of the world to your city, and 

 when the recent celebration of the ninth jubilee of your University has 

 shown how deeply the prosperity of the present is rooted in the past. 

 What wonder, then, if I take the Chair to which you have called me with 

 some misgivings 1 Born and bred in the South, I am to preside over a 

 Meeting held in the largest city of Scotland. As your chosen mouth- 

 piece I am to speak to you of science when we stand at the parting of 

 the centuries, and when the achievements of the past and present, and 

 the promise of the future, demand an interpreter with gifts of knowledge 

 and divination to which I cannot pretend. Lastly, I am President of the 

 British Association as a disciple in the home of the master, as a physicist 

 in a city which a physicist has made for ever famous. Whatever the 

 future may have in store for Glasgow, whether your enterprise is still to 

 add wharf to wharf, factory to factory, and street to street, or whether 

 some unforeseen ' tide in the affairs of men ' is to sweep energy and 

 success elsewhere, fifty-three years in the history of your city will never 

 be forsfotten while civilisation lasts. 



More than half a century ago, a mere lad was the first to compel the 

 British Association to listen to the teaching of Joule, and to accept the 

 law of the conservation of energy. Now, alike in the most difficult 

 mathematics and in the conception of the most ingenious apparatus, in 

 the daring of his speculations and in the soundness of his engineering, 

 William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, is regarded as a leader by the science 

 and industry of the whole world. 



It is the less necessary to dwell at length upon all that he has done, 

 for Lord Kelvin has not been without honour in his own country. Many 

 of us, who meet here to night, met last in Glasgow when the University 

 and City had invited representatives of all nations to celebrate the Jubilee 

 of his professorship. For those two or three days learning was sur- 

 rounded with a pomp seldom to be seen outside a palace. The strange 

 middle-age costumes of all the chief Universities of the world were 

 jostling here, the outward signs that those who were themselves distin- 

 guished in the study of Nature had gathered to do honour to one of the 

 most distinguished of them all. 



Lord Kelvin's achievements were then described in addresses in every 

 tongue, and therefore I will only remind you that we, assembled here 

 to-night, owe him a heavy debt of gratitude ; for the fact that the British 

 Association enters on the twentieth century conscious of a work to do 

 and of the vigour to do it is largely due to his constant presence at its 

 Meetings and to the support he has so ungrudgingly given. We have 

 learned to know not only the work of our great leader, but the man 

 himself ; and I count myself happy because in his life-long home, under 

 the walls of the University he served so v/ell, and at a Meeting of the 

 Association which his genius has so often illuminated, I -am allowed, as 

 your President, to assure him in your name of the admiration, respect, 

 nay, of the affection, in which we all hold him. 



