PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 29 
treatment of patients suffering from diseases for which radium is bene- 
ficial. 
The new discoveries made in physics in the last few years, and the 
ideas and potentialities suggested by them, have had an effect upon the 
workers in that subject akin to that produced in literature by the Renais- 
sance. Enthusiasm has been quickened, and there is a hopeful, youth- 
ful, perhaps exuberant, spirit abroad which leads men to make with con- 
fidence experiments which would have been thought fantastic twenty 
years ago. It has quite dispelled the pessimistic feeling, not uncommon 
at that time, that all the interesting things had been discovered, and all 
that was left was to alter a decimal or two in some physical constant. 
There never was any justification for this feeling, there never were any 
signs of an approach to finality in science. The sum of knowledge is 
at present, at any rate, a diverging not a converging series. As we 
conquer peak after peak we see in front of us regions full of interest and 
beauty, but we do not see our goal, we do not see the horizon; in the 
distance tower still higher peaks, which will yield to those who ascend 
them still wider prospects, and deepen the feeling, whose truth is 
emphasised by every advance in science, that ‘ Great are the Works ot 
the Lord.’ 
