ADDRESS 
BY 
Sir DAVID GILL, K.C.B., 
LL.D., D.Sc, F.R.S. Hon. F.R.S.E., 
PRESIDENT. 
To-niaut, for the first time in its history, the British Association meets 
in the ancient city of Leicester ; and it now becomes my privilege to 
convey to you, Mr. Mayor, and to the citizens generally, an expression of 
our thanks for your kind invitation and for the hospitable reception 
which you have accorded to us. 
Here in Leicester and last year in York the Association has followed 
its usual custom of holding its annual meeting somewhere in the United 
Kingdom ; but in 1905 the meeting was, as you know, held in South 
Africa. Now, having myself only recently come from the Cape, I wish 
to take this opportunity of saying that this southern visit of the 
Association has, in my opinion, been productive of much good: wider 
interest in science has been created amongst colonists, juster estimates 
of the country and its problems have been formed on the part of the 
visitors, and personal friendships and interchange of ideas between 
thinking men in South Africa and at home have arisen which cannot fail 
to have a beneficial influence on the social, political, and scientific rela- 
tions between these colonies and the mother country. We may confidently 
look for like results from the proposed visit of the Association to Canada 
in 1909. 
One is tempted to take advantage of the wide publicity given to words 
from this Chair to speak at large in the cause of science, to insist upon the 
necessity for its wider inclusion in the education of our youth and the 
devotion of a larger measure of the public funds in aid of scientific research ; 
to point to the supreme value of science as a means for the culture of 
those faculties which in man promote that knowledge which is power = 
and to show how dependent is the progress of a nation upon its scientific 
attainment. 
But in recent years these truths have been prominently brought 
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