PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 609 
only are railways extending in all outlying parts of the world, but at home, 
where the territory is already everywhere intersected with lines, larger and heavier 
locomotives are being used, and longer runs without stopping are being made by 
our express trains. The horsed cars on our tramways are now being mostly super- 
seded by larger cars, electrically propelled and travelling with greatly increased 
speeds. For the handling of the ever-increasing passenger traffic in our great 
cities electric propulsion has shown itself a necessity of the time; witness the 
electric railways in Liverpool and the network of electrically worked tube rail- 
ways throughout London. In ten years the manufacture of automobile carriages 
of all sorts has sprung up into a great industry. Every year sees a greater 
demand for the raw materials and products, out of which the manufacturer will 
in turn produce the articles demanded by our complex modern life. We live 
and work in larger buildings; we make more use of mechanical appliances ; we 
travel more, and our travelling is more expeditious than formerly ; and not we 
alone, but all the progressive nations. The world uses more steel, more copper, 
more aluminium, more paper; therefore requires more coal, more petroleum, 
more timber, more ores, more machinery for the getting and working of them, 
more trains and steamships for their transport. It requires machines that will 
work faster or more cheaply than the old ones to meet the increasing demands of 
manufacture; new fabrics; new dyes; even new foods; new and more powerful 
means of illumination ; new methods of speaking to the ends of the earth. 
We must not delude ourselves with imagining that the happiness and welfare 
of mankind depend only on its material advancement; or that moral, intellectual, 
and spiritual forces are not in the ultimate resort of greater moment. But if the 
inquiry be propounded what it is that has made possible this amazing material 
progress, there is but one answer that can be given—science. Chemistry, physics, 
mechanics, mathematics, it is these that have given to man the possibility of 
organising this tremendous development. And the great profession which has 
been most potent in applying these branches of science to wield the energies of 
Nature and direct them to the service of man has been that of the engineer. 
Without the engineer how little of all this activity could there have been; and 
without mathematics, mechanics, physics, and chemistry, where were the 
engineer ? 
If looking over this England of Edward the Seventh we try to put ourselves 
back into the England of Edward the Sixth—or for that matter of any pre- 
Victorian monarch—we must admit that the differences to be found in the social 
and industrial conditions around us are due not in any appreciable degree to 
any changes in folitics, philosophy, religion, or law, but to science and its 
applications. If we look abroad, and contrast the Germany of Wilhelm the Second 
with the Germany of Charles the Fifth, we shall come to the like conclusion. 
So also in Italy, in Switzerland, in every one indeed of the progressive nations, 
And it is precisely in the stagnant nations, such as Spain, or Servia, where the 
cultivation of science has scarcely begun, that the social conditions remain in the 
backward state of the Middle Ages. 
Interaction of Abstract Science and its Applications. 
In engineering, above all other branches of human effort, we are able to 
trace the close interaction between abstract science and its practical applications. 
Often as the connection between pure science and its applications has been 
emphasised in addresses upon engineering, the emphasis has almost always been 
laid upon the influence of the abstract upon the concrete. We are all familiar 
with the doctrine that the progress of science ought to be an end in itself, that 
scientific research ought to be pursued without regard to its immediate applica- 
tions, that the importance of a discovery must not be measured by its apparent 
utility at the moment. We are assured that research in pure science is bound to 
work itself out in due time into technical applications of utility, and that the 
pioneer ought not to pause in his quest to work out potential industrial develop- 
ments. We are invited to consider the example of the immortal Faraday, who 
1907. RR 
