ADDRESS. O 



I have already mentioned a number of circumstances which make our 

 Meeting this year noteworthy ; to these I must add that for the first time 

 we have a Section for Education, and the importance of this new de- 

 parture, due largely to the energy of Professor Armstrong, is emphasised 

 by the fact that the Chair of that Section will be occupied by the 

 Vice-President of the Board of Education— Sir John Gorst. I will not 

 attempt to forecast the proceedings of the new Section. Education is 

 passing through a transitional stage. The recent debates in Parliament ; 

 the great gifts of Mr. Carnegie ; the discussion as to University organisa- 

 tion in the North of England ; the reconstitution of the University of 

 London ; the increasing importance attached to the application of know- 

 ledge both to the investigation of Nature and to the purposes of industry, 

 are all evidence of the growing conviction tliat without advance in educa- 

 tion we cannot retain our position among the nations of the world. If 

 the British Association can provide a platform on which these matters 

 may be discussed in a scientific but practical spirit, free from the mis- 

 representations of the hustings and the exaggerations of the partisan, it 

 will contribute in no slight measure to the national welfare. 



But amid the old and new activities of our meeting the undertone 

 of sadness, which is never absent from such gatherings, will be painfully 

 apparent to many of us at Glasgow. Our sympathy goes out to the sister 

 nation across the sea, which is watching by the sick-bed on which the 

 President of the United States has been stretched by a coward hand. 

 You will, I am sure, be glad to hear that the General Committee has 

 already telegraphed, in the name of the Association, to President McKinley 

 assuring him of their earnest hopes for his speedy and complete recovery. 

 Nearer home the life-work of Professor Tait has ended amid the gloom of 

 the war-cloud. A bullet, fired thousands of miles away, struck him to 

 the heart, so that in their deaths the father and the brave son, whom he 

 loved so well, were not long divided. Within the last year, too, America 

 has lost Rowland ; Viriamu Jones, who did yeoman's service for educa- 

 tion and for science, has succumbed to a long and painful illness ; and one 

 who last year at Bradford seconded the proposal that I should be your 

 President at Glasgow, and who would unquestionably have occupied this 

 Chair before long had he been spared to do so, has unexpectedly been called 

 away. A few months ago we had no reason to doubt that George 

 Francis FitzGerald had many years of health and work before him. He 

 had gained in a remarkable way not only the admiration of the scientific 

 world, but the affection of his friends, and we shall miss sadly one whom 

 we all cared for, and who, we hoped, might yet add largely to the 

 achievements which had made him famous. 



The Science of the Nineteenth Century. 



Turning from these sad thoughts to the retrospect of the centujy 

 which has so lately ended, I have found it to be impossible to free myself 



