TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS, 
Section A.—MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE, 
PRESIDENT OF THE SecTIoN.—Professor A. R, Forsytu, 
M.A., D.Se., F.R.S. 
CAPE TOWN. 
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 16. 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
According to an established and unchallenged custom, our proceedings are 
inaugurated by an address from the President. Let me begin it by discharging 
a duty which, unhappily, is of regular recurrence. If your President only men- 
tions names when he records the personal losses suffered during the year by the 
sciences of the Section, the corporate sense of the Section will be able to appre- 
ciate the losses with a deeper reality than can be conveyed by mere words. 
In Mr. Ronald Hudson, who was one of our Secretaries at the Cambridge 
Meeting a year ago, we have lost a mathematician whose youthful promise had 
ripened into early performance. The original work which he had accomplished is 
sufficient, both in quality and in amount, to show that much has been given, and 
that much more could have been expected. His alert and bright personality 
suggested that many happy years lay before him. All these fair hopes were 
shattered in a moment by an accident upon a Welsh hillside; and his friends, 
who were many, deplore his too early death at the age of twenty-eight. 
The death of Mr. Frank McClean has robbed astronomy of one of its most 
patient workers and actively creative investigators. I wish that my own know- 
ledge could enable me to give some not inadequate exposition of his services to 
the science which he loved so well. He was a man of great generosity which was 
wise, discriminating, and more than modest; to wide interests in science he 
united wide interests in the fine arts. Your Astronomer Royal, in the Royal 
Observatory at Cape Town, will not lightly forget his gift of a great telescope: 
and the University of Cambridge, the grateful recipient of his munificent endow- 
ment of the Isaac Newton Studentships fifteen years ago, and of his no less 
munificent bequest of manuscripts, early printed books, and objects of art, has done 
what she can towards perpetuating his memory for future generations by including 
his name in the list, that is annually recited in solemn service, of her benefactors 
who have departed this life. 
In the early days of our gatherings, when the set of cognate sciences with 
which we specially are concerned had not yet diverged so widely from one 
another alike in subject and in method, this inaugurating address was characterised 
by a brevity that a President can envy and by a freedom from formality that even 
the least tolerant audience could find admirable. The lapse of time, perhaps 
assisted by presidential ambitions which have been veiled under an almost periodic 
tonite for personal shortcomings, has deptived these addresses of their ancient. 
evity, and has invested them with an air of oracular gravity. The topies 
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