ANNUAL ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XXXIX 
he is rich; even a scientist may accidentally and against his will 
become rich. 
As to those who are not rich, but who wish to be rich, whose chief 
desire and object is to make money, either to avoid the necessity for 
further labor, or to secure their wives and children from want, or 
for the sake of power and desire to rule, I presume it is unsafe to 
try to offer any apologies for their existence. But when it is 
claimed for any class of men, scientists or others, that they do not 
want these things it is well to remember the remarks made by old 
Sandy Mackay after he had heard a sermon on universal brotherhood: 
“And so the deevil’s dead. Puir auld Nickie; and himso little ap- 
preciated, too. Every gowk laying his sins on auld Nick’s back. 
But I’d no bury him until he began to smell a wee strong like. 
It’s a grewsome thing is premature interment.” 
I have tried to indicate briefly the sense in which the terms “sci- 
entist”’ and “scientific man” are to be used and understood, and 
you see it is not an easy matter. The difficulty is less as regards 
the term “man of science.” By this expression we mean a man who 
belongs to science peculiarly and especially, whose chief object in 
life is scientific investigation, whose thoughts and hopes and desires 
are mainly concentrated upon his search for new knowledge, whose 
thirst for fresh and accurate information is constant and insatiable. 
These are the men who have most advanced science, and whom we 
delight to honor, more especially in these later days, by glowing 
eulogiums of their zeal, energy, and disinterestedness. 
The man of science, as defined by his eulogists, is the beaw idéal 
of a philosopher, a man whose life is dedicated to the advancement 
of knowledge for its own sake, and not for the sake of money or 
fame, or of professional position or advancement. He undertakes 
scientific investigations exclusively or mainly because he loves the 
work itself, and not with any reference to the probable utility of 
the results. Such men delight in mental effort, or in the observa- 
tion of natural phenomena, or in experimental work, or in historical 
research, in giving play to their imagination, in framing hypotheses 
and then in endeavoring to verify or disprove them, but always the 
main incentive is their own personal satisfaction (with which may 
be mingled some desire for personal fame), and not the pleasure or 
the good of others. Carried to an extreme, the eulogy of such men 
and their work is expressed in the toast of the Mathematical Society 
of England: “Pure mathematics; may it never be of use to any 
