4 REPORT—1899. 
commencement of an undertaking which is not only a great thing in itself, 
but which, we trust, is the beginning of still greater things tocome. And 
the share which the Association has had in this was largely Sir Douglas 
Galton’s doing. In his Address as President of Section A, at the meeting of 
the Association at Cardiff in 1891, Professor Oliver Lodge expounded with 
pregnant words how urgently, not pure science only, but industry and the 
constructive arts—for the interests of these are ever at bottom the same 
—needed the aid of some national establishment for the prosecution of 
prolonged and costly physical researches, which private enterprise could 
carry out in a lame fashion only, if at all. Lodge’s words found an echo 
in many men’s minds ; but the response was for a long while in men’s 
minds only. In 1895, Sir Douglas Galton, having previously made a 
personal study of an institution analogous to the one desired—namely, the 
Reichsanstalt at Berlin—seized the opportunity offered to him as President 
of the Association at Ipswich to insist, with the authority not only of the 
head for the time being of a great scientific body, but also of one who 
himself knew the ways and wants at once of science and of practical life, 
that the thing which Lodge and others had hoped for was a thing which 
could be done, and ought to be done at once. And now to-day we can 
say it hasbeendone. The National Physical Laboratory has been founded. 
The Address at Ipswich marked the beginning of an organised effort which 
has at last been crowned with success. A feeling of sadness cannot but 
come over us when we think that Sir Douglas Galton was not spared to 
see the formal completion of the scheme whose birth he did so much to 
help, and which, to his last days, he aided in more ways than one, It is 
the old story—the good which men do tives after them. 
Still older than the Association is this nineteenth century, now swiftly 
’ drawing to its close. Though the century itself has yet some sixteen 
months to run, this.is the last meeting of the British Association which 
will use the numbers eighteen hundred to mark its date. 
The eyes of the young look ever forward ; they take little heed of the 
short though ever-lengthening fragment of life which lies behind them ; 
they are wholly bent on that which is to come. The eyes of the aged 
turn wistfully again and again to the past; as the old glide down the 
inevitable slope their present becomes a living over again the life which 
has gone before, and the future takes on the shape of a brief lengthening 
of the past. May I this evening venture to give rein to the impulses of 
advancing years? May I, at this last meeting of the Association in the 
eighteen hundreds, dare to dwell for a while upon the past, and to call to 
mind a few of the changes which have taken place in the world since those 
autumn days in which men were saying to each other that the last of the 
seventeen hundreds was drawing towards its end ? 
Dover in the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and ninety-nine 
was in many ways unlike the Dover of to-day. On moonless nights men 
groped their way in its narrow streets by the help of swinging lanterns 
