TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 
Section AA—MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SEecTION.—H. F. Baker, Sc.D., F.R.S. 
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER lil. 
The President delivered the following Address : 
The Place of Pure Mathematic: . 
Ir is not a very usual thing for the opening Address of this Section to be 
entrusted to one whose main energies have been devoted to what is called Pure 
Mathematics; but I value the opportunity in order to try to explain what, as I 
conceive it, the justification of the Pure Mathematician is. You will understand 
that in saying this I am putting myself in a position which belongs to me as little 
by vocation as by achievement, since it was my duty through many years to give 
instruction in all the subjects usually regarded as Mathematical Physics, and it 
is still my duty to be concerned with students in these subjects. But my experi- 
ence is that the Pure Mathematician is apt to be regarded by his friends as a 
trifler and a visionary, and the consciousness of this becomes in time a paralysing 
dead-weight. I think that view is founded on want of knowledge. 
Of course, it must be admitted that the mathematician, as such, has no part 
in those public endeavours that arise from the position of our Empire in the 
world, nor in the efforts that must constantly be made for social adjustment at 
home. I wish to make this obvious remark. For surely the scientific man must 
give his time and his work in the faith of at least an intellectual harmony in 
things; and he must wish to know what to think of all that seems out of gear 
in the working of human relations. His own cup of contemplation is often 
golden; he marks that around him there is fierce fighting for cups that are 
earthen, and largely broken; and many there are that go thirsting. And, again, 
the mathematician is as sensitive as others to the marvel of each recurring 
springtime, when, year by year, our common mother seems to call us so loudly to 
consider how wonderful she is, and how dependent we are, and he is as curious 
as to the mysteries of the development of living things. He can draw inspira- 
tion for his own work, as he views the spectacle of a starry night, and sees 
How the floor of heaven 
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. 
Each orb, the smallest, in his motion, sings, 
but the song, once so full of dread, how much it owes to the highest refinements 
of his craft, from at least the time of the Greek devotion to the theory of conic 
sections; how much, that is, to the harmony that is in the human soul. Yet the 
mathematician bears to the natural observer something of the relation which the 
laboratory botanist has come to bear to the field naturalist. Moreover, he is shut 
off from inquiries which stir the public imagination; when he looks back the ages 
over the history of his own subject the confidence of his friends who study 
