99, REPORT—1899. 
and the most encouraging features of the deliberations which have now 
been going on for three years have been the repeated expressions, coming 
not from this or that quarter only, but from almost all quarters, of an 
earnest desire that the effort should succeed, of a sincere belief in the 
good of international co-operation, and of a willingness to sink as far as 
possible individual interests for the sake of the common cause. In the 
face of such a spirit we may surely hope that the many difficulties will 
ultimately pass out of sight. 
Perhaps, however, not the least notable fact of international co-opera- 
tion in science is the proposal which has been made within the last two years 
that the leading academies of the world should, by representatives, meet 
at intervals to discuss questions in which the learned of all lands are 
interested. A month hence a preliminary meeting of this kind will be 
held at Wiesbaden ; and it is at least probable that the closing year of 
that nineteenth century in which science has played so great a part may 
at Paris, during the great World’s Fair—which every friend, not of 
science only, but of humanity, trusts may not be put aside or even injured 
through any untoward event, and which promises to be an occasion not 
of pleasurable sight-seeing only, but also, by its many international con- 
gresses, of international communing in the search for truth—witness the 
first select Witenagemote of the science of the world. 
I make no apology for having thus touched on international co- 
operation. I should have been wanting, had I not done so, to the memorable 
occasion of this meeting. A hundred years ago two great nations were 
grappling with each other in a fierce struggle, which had lasted, with 
pauses, for many years, and was to last for many years to come ; war was 
on every lip and in almost every heart. To-day this meeting has, by a 
common wish, been so arranged that those two nations should, in the 
persons of their men of science, draw as near together as they can, with 
nothing but the narrow streak of the Channel between them, in order 
that they may take counsel together on matters in which they have one 
interest and a common hope. May we not look upon this brotherly 
meeting as one of many signs that science, though she works in a silent 
manner and in ways unseen by many, is steadily making for peace ? 
Looking back, then, in this last year of the eighteen hundreds, on the 
century which is drawing to its close, while we may see in the history of 
scientific inquiry much which, telling the man of science of his short- 
comings and his weakness, bids him be humble, we also see much, perhaps 
more, which gives him hope. Hope is indeed one of the watchwords of 
science. In the latter-day writings of some who know not science, much 
may be read which shows that the writer is losing or has lost hope in the 
future of mankind. There are not a few of these ; their repeated utter- 
ances make a sign of the times. Seeing in matters lying outside science 
few marks of progress and many tokens of decline or of decay, recognising 
