24 REPoRT--~1890, 
adopted for avoiding, lessening, or counteracting injurious stresses, on the 
one hand, and for setting up stresses beneficial to the powers of endurance 
of guns, on the other. One method of experiment pursued, with parts 
of guns, is to cut narrow hoops off the forgings, after a particular treat- 
ment, which are then cut right across at one place, it being observed 
whether, and to what extent, the resulting gaps open or close. This im- 
portant subject has also been similarly investigated by my talented old 
friend and fellow-worker, the President this year of the Mechanical Seec- 
tion, Captain Andrew Noble, whose name in connection with the science 
and practice of artiliery is familiar to us as household words. 
The Crimean War taught Nations many lessons of gravest import, to 
some of which Sir Richard Owen took occasion to call attention most 
impressively in the Address delivered here, before the miseries of that 
war had become past history. The development of sanitary science, to 
which he especially referred, and which sprang from the bitter experience 
of that sad epoch, has had its parallel in the development of the science of 
artillery ; but it would indeed be difficult to establish any parallelism be- 
tween the benefits which even the soldier and the sailor have reaped from 
the great strides made by both these sciences. The acquisition of know- 
ledge of the causes of the then hopelessness of gallant struggles which 
medical skill and self-sacrificing devotion made against the sufferings of 
the victims of battles and of fell diseases, as deadly as the cruellest 
implements of war; the application of that knowledge to the provision of 
the blessings of antiseptic treatment of wonnds and to the intelligent 
utilisation of disinfectants and of other valuable preventive measures, 
to the supply of wholesome water, of wholesome food in campaigning, of 
sensible clothing, and of wholesome air in hospitals, barracks, and ships— 
these are some few of the benefits which the soldier and the sailor have 
derived from the development of sanitary science, which was so powerfully 
stimulated by the terrible lessons learned during the long-drawn-out siege 
of Sebastopol; and it is indeed pleasant to reflect that there has been, for 
years past, most wholesome competition between Nations in the enlarge- 
ment of those benefits, and their dissemination among the men whose 
vocation it is to slay and be slain. The periodical International Con- 
gresses on Hygiene and Demography, of which we shall cordially weleome 
next year’s assemblage in London, and whose members will deplore the 
absence from among them of the veteran Nestor in the science and prac- 
tice of hygiene, Sir Edwin Chadwick, have afforded conclusive demon- 
stration of the heartiness with which Nations are now co-operating with 
a view to utilise the invaluable results attained by the successful labourers 
in sanitary science. 
What, on the other hand, shall we say of the benefits which sailors and 
soldiers, in the pursuit of their calling, derive from the ceaseless costly 
competition amongst Nations for supremacy in the possession of for- 
