ear 
PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. 31 
business of science is to trace out their mode of action everywhere, as 
far and as fully as possible; and it is a true instinct which resents the 
medieval practice of freely introducing spiritual and unknown causes 
into working science. In science an appeal to occult qualities must be 
illegitimate, and be a barrier to experiment and research generally ; 
as, when anything is called an Act of God—and when no more is said. 
The occurrence is left unexplained. As an ultimate statement such a 
phrase may be not only true but universal in its application. But there 
are always proximate explanations which may be looked for and dis- 
covered with patience. So, lightning, earthquakes, and other portents 
are reduced to natural causes. No ultimate explanation is ever attained 
by science: proximate explanations only. They are what it exists for; 
and it is the business of scientific men to seek them. 
To attribute the rise of sap to vital force would be absurd, it would 
be giving up the problem and stating nothing at all. The way in which 
osmosis acts to produce the remarkable and surprising effect is dis- 
coverable and has been discovered. 
So it is always in science, and its progress began when unknown 
causes were eliminated and treated as non-existent. Those causes, so 
far as they exist, must establish their footing by direct investigation 
and research; carried on in the first instance apart from the long- 
recognised branches of science, until the time when they too have 
become sufficiently definite to be entitled to be called scientific. Out- 
landish Territories may in time be incorporated as States, but they 
must make their claim good and become civilised first. 
It is well for people to understand this definite limitation of scope 
quite clearly, else they wrest the splendid work of biologists to their 
own confusion,—helped it is true by a few of the more robust or less 
responsible theorisers, among those who should be better informed and 
more carefully critical in their philosophising utterances. 
But, as is well known, there are more than a few biologists who, 
when taking a broad survey of their subject, clearly perceive and teach 
that before all the actions of live things are fully explained some 
hitherto excluded causes must be postulated. Ever since the time of 
J. R. Mayer it has been becoming more and more certain that as regards 
performance of work a living thing obeys the laws of physics, like 
everything else; but undoubtedly it initiates processes and produces 
results that without it could not have occurred,—from a bird’s nest to 
a honeycomb, from a deal box to a warship. The behaviour of a ship 
firing shot and shell is explicable in terms of energy, but the dis- 
crimination which it exercises between friend and foe is not so explic- 
able. There is plenty of physics and chemistry and mechanics about 
every vital action, but for a complete understanding of it something 
beyond physics and chemistry is needed. 
