ADDRESS. 5 



that has been familiar, conspicuous, and always congenial at the meetings 

 of the British Association during the last forty years. Throughout the 

 greater part of that period Mr. George Griffith discharged the onerous 

 and often delicate duties of the assistant general secretary, not only with 

 conscientious thoroughness and great ability, but also with urbanity, tact, 

 and courtesy that endeared him to all. His years sat lightly upon him, 

 and his undiminished alertness and vigour caused his sudden death to 

 come upon us all with a shock of surprise as well as of pain and grief. 

 The British Association owes him a debt of gratitude which must be so 

 fully realised by every regular attender of our meetings that no poor 

 words of mine are needed to quicken your sense of loss, or to add to the 

 poignancy of your regret. 



The British Association has to deplore the loss from among us of Sir 

 Joseph Gilbert, a veteran who continued to the end of a long life to 

 pursue his important and beneficent researches with untiring energy. 

 The length of his services in the cause of science cannot be better indi- 

 cated than by recalling the fact that he was one of the six past Presidents 

 boasting fifty years' membership whose jubilee was celebrated by the 

 Chemical Society in 1898. He was in fact an active member of that 

 Society for over sixty years. Early in his career he devoted himself to a 

 most important but at that time little cultivated field of research. He 

 strove with conspicuous success to place the oldest of industries on a 

 scientific basis, and to submit the complex conditions of agriculture to a 

 systematic analysis. He studied the physiology of plant life in the open 

 air, not with the object of penetrating the secrets of structure, but with 

 the more directly utilitarian aim of establishing the conditions of success- 

 ful and profitable cultivation. By a long series of experiments alike well 

 conceived and laboriously carried out, he determined the effects of varia- 

 tion in soil, and its chemical treatment — in short, in all the unknown 

 factors with which the farmer previously had to deal according to 

 empirical and local rules, roughly deduced from undigested experi- 

 ence by uncritical and rudimentary processes of inference. Gilbert had 

 the faith, the insight, and the courage to devote his life to an investi- 

 gation so difficult, so unpromising, and so unlikely to bring the rich 

 rewards attainable by equal diligence in other directions, as to offer no 

 attraction to the majority of men. The tabulated results of the Rotham- 

 sted experiments remain as a benefaction to mankind and a monument 

 of indomitable and disinterested perseverance. 



It is impossible for me in this place to offer more than the barest 

 indication of the great place in contemporary science that has been 

 vacated by the lamented death of Professor Alfred Cornu, who so worthily 

 upheld the best traditions of scientific France. He was gifted in a high 

 •degree with the intellectual lucidity, the mastery of form, and the perspicuous 

 method which characterise the best exponents of French thought in all 

 departments of study. After a brilliant career as a student, he was 

 chosen at the early age of twenty-six to fill one of the enviable positions 



