TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION £. 854 
Sicrion B.—CHEMISTRY. 
PresipENT oF THE Section.—Grorae T. BEILy. 
The President delivered the following Address at Johannesburg, on Tuesday, 
August 29:— 
In scanning the list of the elements with which we are thoughtfully supplied 
every year by the International Committee on Atomic Weights, the direction in 
which our thoughts are led will depend on the particular aspect of chemical study 
which happens to interest us at the time. Putting from our minds on the present 
occasion the attractive speculations on atomic constitution and disintegration with 
which we have all become at least superficially familiar during the past few 
years, let us try to scan this list from the point of view of the ‘plain man’ rather 
than from that of the expert chemist. Even a rudimentary knowledge will be 
sufficient to enable our ‘plain man’ to divide the elements broadly into two 
groups—the actually useful and the doubtfully useful or useless. Without going 
into detail we may take it that about two-thirds would be admitted into the first 
group, and one-third into the second. It must, I think, be regarded as a very 
remarkable fact that of the eighty elements which have had the intrinsic stability 
to enable them to survive the prodigious forces which must have been concerned 
in the evolution of the physical universe, so large a proportion are endowed 
with characteristic properties which could ill have been spared either from the 
laboratories of Nature or from those of the Arts and Sciences. Even if one-third 
of the elements are to be regarded as waste products or failures, there is here no 
counterpart to the reckless prodigality of Nature in the processes of organic 
evolution. 
If we exclude those elements which participate directly and indirectly in the 
structure and functions of the organic world, there are two elements which stand 
out conspicuously because of the supreme influence they have exercised over the 
trend of human effort and ambition, I refer, of course, to the metals gold and 
iron. 
From the early beginnings of civilisation gold has been highly prized and 
eagerly sought after. Human life has been freely sacrificed in its acquirement 
from natural sources, as well as in its forcible seizure from those who already 
possessed it. The ‘Age of Gold’ was not necessarily ‘The Golden Age,’ for the 
noble metal in its unique and barbaric splendour has symbolised much that has 
been unworthy in national and individual aims and ideals. 
We have accustomed ourselves to think of the present as the Age of Iron, as 
indeed it is, for we see in the dull, grey metal the plastic medium out of which 
the engineer has modelled the machines and structures which ‘play so large a part 
in the active life of to-day. Had iron not been at once plentiful and cheap, had 
it not brought into the hands of the engineer and artificer its marvellous qualities 
of hardness and softness, of rigidity and toughness, and to the electrician its 
mysterious and unique magnetic qualities, it is not difficult to conceive that man’s 
