TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 



Section A.— MATHEMATICAL AXD PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 

 President op the Section — Professor A. W. Euceek, M.A., P.R.S. 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 9. 



The President delivered the followiug Address : — 



It is impossible for a body of English scientific men to meet in one of our 

 ancient university towns without contrasting the old ideal of the purEiiit of 

 learning ibr its own sake with the modern conception of thu organisation of 

 science as part of a pushing business concern. 



We are, as a nation, convinced that education is essential to national success. 

 Our modern universities are within earshot of the whirr of the cotton-mill or the 

 roar of Piccadilly. Oxford and Cambridge themselves are not content to be 

 centres of attraction to which scholars gravitate. They have devised schemes 

 by which their influence is directly exerted on every market town and almost on 

 every village in the country. University extension is but a part of the extra- 

 ordinary multiplication of the machinery of education which is going on all around 

 us. The British Association, which was once regarded as bringing light into dark 

 pLices, is now welcomed in every large provincial town by a group of well-known 

 men of science ; and we find ready for the meetings of our Sections, not only the 

 chapels and concert-rooms which have so often and so kindly been placed at our 

 disposal, but all the appliances of well-designed lecture-rooms and laboratories. 



I do not propose, however, to detain you this morning with a discourse on the 

 spread of scientific education, but you will forgive me if I illustrate its progress 

 by two facts, not perhaps the most striking which could be selected, but especially 

 appropriate to our place of meeting. It is little more than thirty years since the 

 two branches of science with which our .Section deals. Mathematics and Physics, 

 have been generally recognised as wide enough to require more than one teacher 

 to cope with them in an educational institution of high pretensions and achieve- 

 ment. In 1860 the authorities of the Owens College, Manchester, debated whether 

 it was desirable to create a Professorship of Natural Philosophy in addition to, and 

 independent of, the Chair of Mathematics. It was thought necessary to obtain 

 external support for the opinions of those who advocated this step. An appeal 

 was made to Professors l)e Morgan and Stokes. The former reported that a 

 'course of experimental physics is in itself desirable;' the latter, that 'there 

 would be work enough in a large institution for a mathematician and a physicist.' 



In the end the Chair of Natural Philosophy was established, and the fact that 

 our host of to-day, Professor Clifton, was its first occupant reminds us how little 

 we have advanced in time and how far in educational developmout from the days 



