6 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
practice of the colleges to give scholarships for proficiency in one sub- 
ject alone. I went through a list of the scholarships awarded in the 
University of Cambridge last winter, and, though there were 202 of 
them, I could only find three cases in which it was specified that the 
award was made for proficiency in more than one subject. 
The premature specialisation fostered by the preparation for these 
scholarships injures the student by depriving him of adequate literary 
culture, while when it extends, as it often does, to specialisation in one 
or two branches of science, it retards the progress of science by tending 
to isolate one science from another. The boundaries between the 
sciences are arbitrary, and tend to disappear as science progresses. The 
principles of one science often find most striking and suggestive 
illustrations in the phenomena of another. Thus, for example, the 
physicist finds in astronomy that effects he has observed in the labora- 
tory are illustrated on the grand scale in the sun and stars. No better 
illustration of this could be given than Professor Hale’s recent dis- 
covery of the Zeeman effect in the light from sunspots; in chemistry, 
too, the physicist finds in the behaviour of whole series of reactions 
illustrations of the great laws of thermodynamics, while if he turns to the 
biological sciences he is confronted by problems, mostly unsolved, of 
unsurpassed interest. Consider for a moment the problem presented 
by almost any plant—the characteristic and often exquisite detail of 
flower, leaf, and habit—and remember that the mechanism which con- 
trols this almost infinite complexity was once contained in a seed per- 
haps hardly large enough to be visible. We have here one of the most 
entrancing problems in chemistry and physics it is possible to conceive. 
Again, the specialisation prevalent in schools often prevents students 
of science from acquiring sufficient knowledge of mathematics; it is 
true that most of those who study physics do some mathematics, but 
I hold that, in general, they do not do enough, and that they are not 
as efficient physicists as they would be if they had a wider knowledge 
of that subject. There seems at present a tendency in some quarters 
to discourage the use of mathematics in physics; indeed, one might 
infer, from the statements of some writers in quasi-scientific journals, 
that ignorance of mathematics is almost a virtue. . If this is so, then 
surely of all the virtues this is the easiest and most prevalent. 
I do not for a moment urge that the physicist should confine him- 
self to looking at his problems from the mathematical point of view; 
on the contrary, I think a famous French mathematician and physicist 
was guilty of only slight exaggeration when he said that no discovery 
was really important or properly understood by its author unless and 
until he could explain it to the first man he met in the street. 
But two points of view are better than one, and the physicist who 
is also a mathematician possesses a most powerful instrument for 
scientific research with which many of the greatest discoveries have been 
