NOTICES AND ABSTRACTS 



OP 



MISCELLANEOUS COMMUNICATIONS TO THE SECTIONS. 



MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICS. * 



Address by Professor Sir "William Thomson, LL.D., M.A., F.B.S., President 



of the Section. 



A CONVERSATION whicli I had with Professor Newcomb one evening last June, in 

 Professor Henry's drawing-room in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, has 

 forced me to give all my spare thoughts ever since to Hopkins's problem of Preces- 

 sion and Nutation, assuming the earth a rigid spheroidal shell filled with liquid. 

 Six weeks ago, when I landed in England after a most interesting trip to America 

 and back, and became painfully conscious that I must have the honour to address 

 you here today, I wished to wiite an Address of which science in America should 

 be the subject. I came home, indeed, vividly impressed with much that I had 

 seen both in the Great Exhibition of Philadelphia and out of it, showing the truest 

 scientific spirit and devotion, the originality, the inventiveness, the patient perseve- 

 ring thoroughness of work, the appreciativeness, and the generous open-mindedness 

 and sympathy, from which the gi-eat things of science come. 



" GeXai \iyeii' 'ATpi-lSas 

 GeXu) Se KaSfiov q,5eiv" 



I wish I could speak to you of the veteran Henry, generous rival of Faraday in 

 electromagnetic discover}' ; of Peirce, the founder of high mathematics in America ; 

 of Bache, and of the splendid heritage he has left to America and to the world in 

 the United-States Coast Survey ; of the great school of astronomers which followed 

 —Gould, Newton, Newcomb, Watson, Young, Alvan Clarke, Rutherford, Draper 

 (father and son) ; of Commander Belknap and his great exploration of the Pacific 

 depths by pianoforte-wire with imperfect apparatus supplied from Glasgow, out of 

 which he forced a success in his own way ; of Captain Sigsbee, who followed 

 with like fervom- and resolution, and made further improvements in the apparatus 

 by which lie has done marvels of easy, quick, and sure deep-sea sounding in his 

 little surveying-ship ' Blake ; ' and of the admirable official spirit which makes such 

 men and such doings possible in the United-States Naval Service. I would like to 

 tell you, too, of my reasons for confidently expecting that American hydrogi-aphy 

 will soon supply the data from tidal observations, long ago asked of our Govern- 

 ment in vain by a Committee of the British Association, by which the amoimt of 

 the earth's elastic yielding to the distorting influence of sun and moon will be 

 measured ; and of my strong hope that the Compass Department of the American 

 Navy will repay the debt to France, England, and Germany, so appreciatively 

 acknowledged in their reprint of the works of Poisson, -^ijyj Arcliibald Smith, 



1876. 1 



