f RESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, 581 



three mdispeusable, yot no two alike, except in their euthiisiaau for the sciences 

 for the advancement of which Section A exists. 



To these I might indeed add auotlier type, the private contributor to the 

 physical exploration of the visible universe, of which Ireland furnishes so many 

 noble examples ; and in that connection let nie give expression to the sense of 

 grievous loss, to this Association and to Science, occasioned by the premature 

 death of W. E. Wilson, of Daramona, a splendid example of that type. 



[When the preceding paragraph was written I was mindful of special 

 obligations, official and personal, to Birr Castle, and I must be allowed to associate 

 myself and the Section with all that was said at the opening meeting about the 

 late Earl of Rosse.] 



In the division of the work of advancing the sciences of mathematics and 

 physics and their application to the service of mankind, I am reminded of Di^den's 

 somewhat lopsided comparison of the relative influence of music and song in his 

 Ode to St. Cecilia's Day. If I may be pardoned for comparing small things with 

 great, the power of Timotheus' music over Alexander's moods was hardly less 

 complete than Kelvin's power to touch every department of the working world 

 with bis genius. But I may remind you that, after a prolonged description of 

 the tremendous influence of Timotheus upon the victorious hero, the poet deals 

 in one stanza with his nominal subject : — 



' At last divine Cecilia came, 

 Inven tress of the vocal frame ; 

 The sweet enthusiast, from lier sacred store, 

 Enlarged the former narrow bounds 



With nature's mother-wit, and arts unknown before. 



Let old Timotheus yield the prize, 



Or both divide tlae crown ; 

 He raised a mortal to the skies, 

 She drew an angel down.' 



I doubt if any of my hearers who knew Strachey by sight would recognise in 

 him the scientific reincarnation of St. Cecilia, but it is none the less true that he 

 was pre-eminent among men in inventing the means of drawing angels down and 

 using their service for the attuning of common life to a scientific standard. It 

 may be equally hard for those who knew him to look upon Eliot as a vocal frame, 

 for of all his physical capacities his voice was the least impressive ; and yet it is 

 not untrue to say that be was conspicuously a medium by which the celestial har- 

 monies of the physical sciences were brought into touch with the practical life of 

 India through his work, which is represented by a considerable number of the 

 twenty volumes of Memoirs of the Indian Meteorological Service. 



I do not indulge in this poetic extravagance without some underlying reason. 

 Speaking for the physics of the atmosphere, there is a real distinction between these 

 three sides of scientific work. To some is given the power of the mathe natician 

 or the physicist to raise the mortal to the skies, to solve some problem which, if not 

 in itself a meteorological one, still has a bearing, sooner or later to be discovered 

 and developed, upon the working of atmospheric phenomena. It is easy enough to 

 cite illustrious examples : among notable instances there recur to my mind Uay- 

 leigh's work on the colour of the sky and Pernter's meteorological optics ; papers 

 by Ferrel and others on the general circulation of the atmosphere ; Kelvin and 

 Rayleigh on the elastic oscillations of the atmosphere ; the papers by Hagen, 

 Helmholtz, Oberbeck, Margules, Hertz, and Yon Bezold on the dynamics and 

 thermodynamics of the atmosphere, collected and translated by Cleveland Abbe ; 

 the work on atmospheric absorption by Langley and the theoretical papers on radia- 

 tion by Poynting ; those on condensation nuclei by Aitken and C. T. R. Wilson, 

 and the recent work on atmospheric electricity, including the remarlcable paper by 

 Wilson on the quiet transference of electricity from the air to the ground. 



But these things are not of themselves applied to the meteorology of 

 everyday life, ft is, in a way, a separate sense, given to few, to realise the 



