ADDRESS 
BY 
Proressor E. A. SCHAFER, LL.D., D.Sc., M.D., F.R.S 
PRESIDENT. 
Iv is exactly forty-five years ago—to the day and hour—that the British 
Association last met in this city and in this hall to listen to a Presi- 
dential Address. The President was the Duke of 
Introductory. Biccleuch; the General Secretaries, Francis Galton and 
T. Archer Hirst; the General Treasurer, William Spottiswoode; and 
the Assistant General Secretary, George Griffith, who was for many 
years a mainstay of the Association. The Evening Discourses were 
delivered by John Tyndall ‘ On Matter and Force,’ by Archibald Geikie 
‘ On the Geological Origin of the Scenery of Scotland,’ and by Alexander 
Herschel ‘ On the Present State of Knowledge regarding Meteors and 
Meteorites.’ The Presidents of Sections, which were then only seven in 
number, were for Mathematics and Physics, Sir William Thomson— 
later to be known as Lord Kelvin; for Chemistry, Thomas Anderson ; 
. for Geology, Archibald Geikie, who now as President of the Royal 
Society worthily fills the foremost place in science within the realm ; 
for Biology, William Sharpey, my own revered master, to whose 
teaching and influence British physiology largely owes the honourable 
position which it at present occupies ; for Geography, Sir Samuel Baker, 
the African explorer, who with his intrepid wife was the first to follow 
the Nile to its exit from the Albert Nyanza; for Economic Science, 
Mr. Grant Duff; and for Mechanical Science, Professor Rankine. 
Other eminent men present were Sir David Brewster, J. Clerk 
Maxwell, Charles Wheatstone, Balfour Stewart, William Crookes, 
J. B. Lawes and J. H. Gilbert (names inseparable in the history of 
agricultural science), Crum Brown, G. D. Liveing, W. H. Russell, 
Alexander Williamson, Henry Alleyne Nicholson, G. J. Allman, 
John Hutton Balfour, Spencer Cobbold, Anton Dohrn, Sir John 
Lubbock (now Lord Avebury), William McIntosh, E. Ray Lankester, 
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