42 president's address. 



country, and will be proclucfcive of great benefit to humanity. The Lister 

 Institute took its origin in the surplus of a fund raised by Sir James 

 Whitehead when Lord Mayor, some sixteen years ago, for the purpose of 

 making a gift to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where many English 

 patients had been treated without charge, after being bitten by rabid 

 dogs. Three thousand pounds was sent to M. Pasteur, and the surplus of 

 a few hundred pounds was made the starting-point of a fund which grew, 

 by one generous gift and another, until the Lister Institute on the 

 Thames Embankment at Chelsea was set up on a site presented by that 

 good and high-minded man, the late Duke of Westminster. 



Many other noble gifts to scientific research have been made in this 

 country during the period on which we are looking back. Let us be 

 thankful for them, and admire the wise munificence of the donors. But 

 none the less we must refuse to rely entirely on such liberality for the 

 development of the army of science, which has to do battle for mankind 

 against the obvious disabilities and sufferings which afflict us and can be 

 removed by knowledge. The organisation and finance of this army should 

 be the care of the State. 



It is a fact which many of us who have observed it regret very keenly, 

 that there is to-day a less widespread interest than formerly in natural 

 history and general science, outside the strictly professional arena of the 

 school and university. The field naturalists among the squires and the 

 country parsons seem nowadays not to be so numerous and active in their 

 delightful pursuits as formerly, and the Mechanics' Institutes and Lecture 

 Societies of the days of Lord Brougham have given place, to a very large 

 extent, to musical performances, bioscopes, and other entertainments, 

 more diverting, but not really more capable of giving pleasure than those 

 in which science was popularised. No doubt the organisation and pro- 

 fessional character of scientific work are to a large extent the cause of this 

 falling-off" in its attraction for amateurs. But perhaps that decadence is 

 also due in some measure to the increased general demand for a kind of 

 manufactured gaiety, readily sent out in these days of easy transport from 

 the great centres of fashionable amusement to the provinces and rural 

 districts. 



In conclusion, I would say a word in reference to the associations of 

 our place of meeting, the birthplace of our Association. It seems to me not 

 inappropriate that an Association for the Advancement of Science should 

 have taken its origin under the walls of York Minster, and that the clergy 

 of the great cathedral should have stood by its cradle. It is not true that 

 there is an essential antagonism between the scientific spirit and what is 

 called the religious sentiment. ' Religion,' said Bishop Creighton, ' means 

 the knowledge of our destiny and of the means of fulfilling it.' We 

 can say no more and no less of Science. Men of Science seek, in all 

 reverence, to discover the Almighty, the Everlasting. They claim sympathy 

 and friendship with those who, like themselves, have turned away from the 

 more material struggles of human life, and have set their hearts and minds 

 on the knowledge of the Eternal. 



