8 REPORT — 1902. 



gone to sleep. In various directions an immense advance has been 

 effected during the twenty-eight years that have elapsed since the last 

 visit of the British Association. Belfast has become first a city and then 

 a county, and now ranks as one of the eight largest cities in the United 

 Kingdom. Its municipal area has been considerably extended, and its 

 population has increased by something like 75 per cent. It has not only 

 been extended, but improved and beautified in a manner which very 

 few places can match, and which probably none can surpass. Fine new 

 thoroughfares, adorned with admirable public institutions, have been run 

 through areas once covered with crowded and squalid buildings. Com- 

 pared with the early fifties, when iron shipbuilding was begun on a very 

 modest scale, the customs collected at the port have increased tenfold. 

 Since the introduction of the power-loom, about 1850, Belfast has dis- 

 tanced all rivals in the linen industry, which continues to flourish not- 

 withstanding the fact that most of the raw material is now imported, 

 instead of being produced, as in former times, in Ulster. Extensive 

 improvements have been carried out in the port at a cost of several 

 millions, and have been fully justified by a very great expansion of trade. 

 These few bare facts sufiice to indicate broadly the immense strides taken 

 by Belfast in the last two decades. For an Association that exists for 

 the advancement of science it is stimulating and encouraging to 6nd itself 

 in the midst of a vigorous community, successfully applying knowledge to 

 the ultimate purpose of all human effort, the amelioration of the common 

 lot by an ever-increasing mastery of the powers and resources of Nature. 



Tyndall and Evolution. 



The Presidential Address delivered by Tyndall in this city twenty- 

 eight years ago will always rank as an epoch-making deliverance. Of all 

 the men of the time, Tyndall was one of the best equipped for the 

 presentation of a vast and complicated scientific subject to the mass of 

 his fellow-men. Gifted with the powers of a many-sided original investi- 

 gator, he had at the same time devoted much of his time to an earnest 

 study of philosophy, and his literary and oratorical powers, coupled with 

 a fine poetic instinct, were qualifications which placed him in the front 

 rank of the scientific representatives of the later Victorian epoch, and 

 constituted him an exceptionally endowed exponent of scientific thought. 

 In the Belfast discourse Tyndall dealt with the changing aspects of the 

 long unsettled horizon of human thought, at last illuminated by the 

 sunrise of the doctrine of evolution. The consummate art with which he 

 marshalled his scientific forces for the purpose of effecting conviction of 

 the general truth of the doctrine has rarely been surpassed. The courage, 

 the lucidity, the grasp of principles, the moral enthusiasm with which he 

 treated his great theme, have powerfully aided in effecting a great 

 intellectual conquest, and the victory assuredly ought to engender no 

 regrets. 



