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Section G.— MECHANICAL SCIENCE. 



President of the Section — Pi-ofessor Osboene Eetnolds, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S., 



M.Inst.C.E. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1. 



The President delivered tbe following Address : — 



Ax a meeting of the British Association in Manchester the subjects of interest to 

 the members of this Section are sure to be numerous, and the attendance of those 

 members whose opinions on the various subjects presented the Section will like 

 to hear is sure to be such that every moment of the time at the disposal of the 

 Section will be well occupied. It is also particularly undesirable to prolong the 

 sittings, and so reduce the opportunities of visiting the exhibition and numerous 

 works which abound with things which cannot fail to be of intense interest to 

 members of this Section. 



For these reasons I feel extremely unwilling to occupy the time of the Section 

 with more than the briefest remarks by way of an address. Indeed, were it not 

 that when in this chair in 1872 Sir Frederick Bramwell laid down the rule that 

 for the President to break the custom of an address would be to show disrespect 

 to the Section, I should have felt justified in consulting my inclination and pro- 

 ceeding at once with the regular work which lies before us. 



It is now twenty-six years since the last meeting of this Section was held in 

 Manchester, and it certainly seems fitting that in an address on this occasion 

 something should be said as to the achievements in mechanical science accom- 

 plished in the interval. I wish sincerely that the task had fallen to some of you 

 gentlemen whose far greater experience and power of expression would have 

 enabled you to do justice to the subject. But under the circumstances I can only 

 ask you to take it as a mark of my extreme respect for the Section, and proof of 

 the appreciation in which I hold the honour conferred upon me in placing me in 

 tliis chair, that I venture as a matter of duty to make a few remarks of the inade- 

 quacy of which I am only too conscious. 



It is always difficult to arrive at a just appreciation of the relative importance 

 of the events of our own time ; and in any endeavour to review or take stock of 

 the mechanical advance of the last quarter of a century, during which time things 

 mechanical have divided the attention of the civilised world with matters political, 

 it seems very necessary to remember that as the mechanical age gets older its 

 relative activity is not to be gauged by the relative number and importance of such 

 epoch-marking mechanical departures as compared with those which have distin- 

 guished past periods. 



If you recall — and again, to quote Sir Frederick BramweU, the only purpose 

 of an address is to force you to recall what you already know — in 1861 not only 

 had we railways, ocean steamships, including the ' Great Eastern,' still the giant 

 of the tribe, a complete system of machinery for cotton and textile fabrics, besides 

 the steam hammer, Armstrong's accumulator, and types of all machme tools, but 

 also one attempt had been made to lay an Atlantic cable ; the Suez Canal was in 

 course of construction ; if not perfected, the Bessemer process was in use ; as were 



