ADDRESS. ra | 
heavens and of the earth—all these are being carried on by international 
organisations. 
In this and in other countries men’s minds have this long while past 
heen greatly moved by the desire to make fresh efforts to pierce the dark 
secrets of the forbidding Antarctic regions. Belgium has just made a 
brave single-handed attempt; a private enterprise sailing from these 
shores is struggling there now, lost for the present to our view ; and this 
year we in England and our brethren in Germany are, thanks to the 
promised aid of the respective Governments, and no less to private 
liberality, in which this Association takes its share, able to begin the 
preparation of carefully organised expeditions. That international amity 
of which I am speaking is illustrated by the fact that in this country and in 
that there is not only a great desire, but a firm purpose, to secure the 
fullest co-operation between the expeditions which will leave the two 
shores. If in this momentous attempt any rivalry be shown between the 
two nations, it will be for each a rivalry, not in forestalling, but in assist- 
ing the other. May I add that if the story of the past may seem to give 
our nation some claim to the seas as more peculiarly our own, that claim 
bespeaks a duty likewise peculiarly our own to leave no effort untried by 
which we may plumb the seas’ yet unknown depths and trace their yet 
unknown shores? That claim, if it means anything, means that when 
nations are joining hands in the dangerous work of exploring the un- 
known South, the larger burden of the task should fall to Britain’s share ; 
it means that we in this country should see to it, and see to it at once, 
that the concerted Antarctic expedition which in some two years or so 
will leave the shores of Germany, of England, and, perhaps, of other lands, 
should, so far as we are concerned, be so equipped and so sustained that 
the risk of failure and disaster may be made as small, and the hope of 
being able not merely to snatch a hurried glimpse of lands not yet seen, 
but to gather in with full hands a rich harvest of the facts which men not 
of one science only, but of many, long to know, as great as possible. 
Another international scientific effort demands a word of notice. The 
need which every inquirer in science feels to know, and to know quickly, 
what his fellow-worker, wherever on the globe he may be carrying on his 
work or making known his results, has done or is doing, led some four 
years back to a proposal for carrying out by international co-operation 
a complete current index, issued promptly, of the scientific literature 
of the world. Though much labour in many lands has been spent 
upon the undertaking, the project is not yet an accomplished fact. Nor 
can this, perhaps, be wondered at, when the difficulties of the task are 
weighed. Difficulties of language, difficulties of driving in one team all 
the several sciences which, like young horses, wish each to have its head 
free with leave to go its own way, difficulties mechanical and financial of 
press and post, difficulties raised by existing interests—these and yet 
other difficulties are obstacles not easy to be overcome. The most striking 
