^^50 REPORT— 1898. 



Section F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 

 Peesidenx of the Section — James Bonae, M.A., LL.D., F.S.S. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8. 



The President delivered the folio wiug Address : — 



Old Lights and Neiv in Economic Study. 



Foe many years after the founding of the British Association sixty-seven years 

 ago, it furnished to serious and mature students of various branches of science 

 their chief, if not their only, opportunity of meeting one another in large numbers 

 to compare notes and discuss suggestions. The press and the railway were not 

 then what they are now ; and it may be thought that the purposes which the 

 Association was formed to fulfil are now fulfilled equally well in other ways. 

 One advantage, indeed, remains unimpaired ; devotees of one special study are 

 reminded that there are other studies than their own ; they are in presence of a 

 federation of sciences more or less dependent on one another. Apart from this, 

 an itinerant association may be of particular service to economic students. 

 They enlarge their vision by changing their place of sojourn. They realise better 

 that the life of the English nation is in many respects more active in the provinces 

 than in the metropolis. Students of other subjects may be, as it were, detached 

 from locality and have the whole world, or at least no particular part of it, for 

 their hunting-ground. But there is a sense in which the economist or statistician 

 lives by the localities. They present him with experiments ready made on his 

 own chosen field, whether sad or glad, whether showing the dubious, if not dis- 

 heartening, effects of foreign bounties, or the encouraging results of wise municipal 

 enterprise. The visitors and the visited ought both to learn from one another, if 

 such meetings are not to be wasted. Economic students at Bristol will have them- 

 selves to blame if they do not discover that students from other quarters would 

 be in league with them, and desire both to get encouragement and to give it. 



Bristol is the city not only of the Cabots, Cany nges, Colston and Draper, Chatter- 

 ton, Hannah ]\Iore and Southey, but of John Gary, Josiah Tucker, and Edmund 

 Burke. It has twice before this year been the meeting-place of the British 

 Association — in 1836 and in 1875. On the last occasion the Economic Section 

 was under the presidency of the distinguished statistician, ]Mr. James Heywood, 

 but lately gone from us. It held some important discussions. Professor Jevons 

 repeated his appeals, first made in 1865, on the subject of the Supply of Coal, 

 and read his paper on the Influence of the Period of Sun Spots on the Price of 

 Corn. The reasonings of the second paper are not now regarded as conclusive; 

 economic periods are not to be strictly determined by physical alone. But the 

 ■warning of Jevons, that we must expect to be straitened in our supplies of coal 

 before many score years, is still sounding in the ears of our public men, and, when 

 they have any leisure to think of remote evils, they nervously anticipate a time 

 when British progress will be slackened through the abridgment, or, at least, the 



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