420 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION B. 
Section B.—CHEMISTRY. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION: 
Professor H. E. Armstrone, Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S. 
THURSDAY, AUGUST 26. 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
Ir is rccorded that after saying, on a certain occasion, ‘I shall not often 
give arguments but frequently opinions—I trust, with courtesy and pro- 
priety, etc.,’? a professor of world-wide reputation remarked, ‘A man’s 
opinions, look you, are generally of much more value than his arguments. 
These last are made by his brain and perhaps he does not believe the 
proposition they tend to prove—as is often the case with paid lawyers ; 
but opinions are formed by our whole nature—brain, heart, instinct, brute 
life, everything all our experience has shaped for us by contact with the 
whole circle of our being.’ 
Of his many charming utterances at the breakfast table, I would select 
this as one of the most noteworthy and just withal. Chemists especially 
need to take both opinions and feelings as well as arguments into account to 
appreciate more fully, perhaps, than is now customary the need of culti- 
vating and giving expression to that state of mind which is the main quali- 
fication of the expert—the state of mind which, let me insist, in the case 
of the chemist, is only to be acquired by constantly associating with and 
constantly handling substances in being and in the making, by constantly 
striving to become acquainted with their innermost nature and idiosyncrasies. 
It is safe to say that much of the subject-matter of our science cannot yet be 
quantified and probably never will be; 1t is even easy to overrate the value of 
quantitative measurements, as the processes studied, more often than not, 
are involved operations that can only with difficulty, if at all, be resolved 
into their factors. 
After an interval only a year short of a quarter of a century, it is my 
privilege again to occupy the chair of this Section and that, too, under con- 
ditions of special significance. The British Association has never before 
sought to carry the banner of science so far west into British Dominions— 
never before was it so clear that the progress of humanity is linked with the 
progress of science by an indissoluble bond: science defined in a word being 
knowledge; yet not mere word nor mere lip knowledge but systematised 
established knowledge—not assumed knowledge, although hypothesis often 
serves to guide inquiry and truth is arrived at only gradually and slowly 
by a series of rough approximations. Moreover, science is true knowledge 
of every kind—there is too often a tendency to give a narrow interpretation 
