REPORT OF THE COUNCIL. Ixxxill 
REPORT OF THE COUNCIL. 
Report of the Council for the Year 1898-99, presented to the General 
Committee at Dover on Wednesday, September 13, 1899. 
Tne Meeting this year will be memorable from the fact that for the first 
time in the history of the Association the time and place of meeting have 
been fixed in conjunction with and in response to an invitation of the 
French Association for the Advancement of Science, with the object of 
affording an opportunity for the members of the sister Associations to 
exchange visits and to participate in scientific discussions in their several 
Sections. To carry out this intention, arrangements have been made for 
our Association to receive a visit from the members of the French Asso- 
ciation on Saturday, September 16, and the Association Frangaise has, on 
its part, invited the members of the British Association to pay a return 
visit on the following Thursday, and has expressed a desire that some 
of our members should join in an excursion to places of interest which has 
been planned for the following days. 
The Council have to deplore the loss by death of Sir Douglas Galton, 
who, for twenty-four years, occupied the responsible office of General 
Secretary, a post which he resigned only on becoming President of the 
Association in 1895, at the Ipswich Meeting. The Council desire to place 
on record their sense of the invaluable services rendered by Sir Douglas 
Galton to the Association. 
The Council regret to announce that a vacancy has been caused in the 
list of Vice-Presidents for this meeting in consequence of the lamented 
death of Lord Herschell. 
An invitation was received from the Vice-Chancellor of the University 
of Cambridge to nominate a delegate to represent the Association at the 
Jubilee of Sir George Gabriel Stokes, which was celebrated on June 1 
and June 2. The President, Sir William Crookes, was appointed to 
represent the Association, and to present the following Address :— 
To Str Groree GasrRiet Sroxes, Bart., D.CL., LL.D., ERS, 
The Council of the British Association for the Advancement of Science desire to 
offer you their cordial congratulations on the completion of fifty years of your tenure of 
the Lucasian Professorship in the University of Cambridge. 
You have been a Member of the Association for more than half a century, and 
have served it in many capacities during that period. You were appointed Secretary 
of the Section of Mathematical and Physical Science in 1845, and continued in this 
laborious office until 1851. In the two following years you were a Vice-President of 
the Section, and became President in 1854 and again in 1862. Many times Vice- 
President, you were President of the Association in 1869, at the meeting in Exeter, 
and have been a permanent Member of the Council for the last thirty years. 
Your services to the Association, and to the cause for which it exists, are far 
from being fully told by a mere enumeration of the offices you have held. In 1852 
you gave an Evening Lecture to the Members at the Belfast Meeting on a branch of 
Optics which has been chiefly elucidated by your own researches ; and from 1845, 
the first year of your membership, till the meeting last year at Bristol, the Reports 
of the Association have been enriched year by year by your contributions. Your 
celebrated reports on ‘Researches in Hydrodynamics,’ published in 1846, and on 
‘Double Refraction,’ in 1862, are constantly referred to as classical writings by the 
cultivators of those branches of Physics, and have conferred abiding lustre on the 
publications of the Association. 
Of your other conspicuous services to the cause of Science it is almost needless to 
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