NOTICES AND ABSTRACTS 



OF 



MISCELLANEOUS COMMUNICATIONS TO THE SECTIONS. 



MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICS. 



Address by Professor G. Carey Poster, F.B.S., President of the Section. 



When any one fears that lie lias accepted a duty that is too difficult for him, or 

 that he has allowed himself to be placed in a position, the responsibilities of which 

 are greater than he can properly discharge, probably the very worst thing he can 

 do is to proclaim his misgivings to the world. But though I fully believe in this 

 rather obvious maxim, I cannot avoid saying that I enter upon my duties here 

 to-day with very great diffidence, and that I feel the necessity of asking your in- 

 dulgence at the outset for what I fear will be my inevitable shortcomings in dis- 

 charging the functions of the honourable post that has been assigned to me. And 

 I am sure that no one who calls to mind the names of some of those who, within 

 recent years, have occupied the chair of this Section, and who knows — however 

 imperfectly — what those names stand for in connexion with Mathematics and 

 Physics, will be surprised that I should deprecate comparisons which might tend 

 to degenerate into contrasts, or that I should shrink from having my performances 

 measured by the standard of such predecessors. But I have neither the right nor 

 the desire to detain you longer with this purely personal topic, and 1 therefore 

 proceed to ask your attention to matters more closely connected with the business 

 which has brought ns here. 



The periodically recurring character of these meetings unavoidably suggests, at 

 each recurrence, a retrospect at the scientific work of the year, and an attempt to 

 estimate the advances which have been the result of this work. At first sight 

 nothing would seem to be more natural or appropriate than that each President of 

 a Section should occupy the introductory remarks, which the custom of the Asso- 

 ciation demands from him, with an account of the chief forward steps made during 

 the past year in the branches of science represented by his Section. 



Very little consideration, however, is sufficient to show that, in the case at 

 least of Section A, to give any thing like a general report of progress would be a 

 task which few, if any, men could perform single-handed. To say nothing of the 

 enormous amount of the material which is now the result of a year's scientific 

 activity, the variety — or I might even say the unlikeness — of the subjects of which 

 this Section takes cognizance is so great that, in most cases, it would be safe to 

 conclude, from the mere fact of a man being able adequately to expound the recent 

 advances in one of these subjects, that he must have given so much attention to 

 this one as to have made it impossible for him to have followed carefully the pro- 

 gress of the rest. 



But even supposing that all Presidents of Section A were able to discourse with 

 full and equal knowledge of hyper-Jacobian surfaces, the influence of temperature 



1877. 1 



