322 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION B. 
Section B.—CHEMISTRY. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SEcTION.—Professor Witu1am J. Porn, M.A., 
BUD. SRS: 
MELBOURNE. 
FRIDAY, AUGUST 14. 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
Tue British Association has been firmly established as one of the institutions 
of our Empire for more than half a century past. The powerful hold which 
it has acquired probably arises from the welcome which every worker in science 
extends to an occasional cessation of his ordinary routine—a respite during 
which the details of the specific inquiry in hand may be temporarily cast aside, 
and replaced by leisurely discussion with colleagues on the broader issues of 
scientific progress. 
The investigator, continually occupied with his own problems and faced with 
an ever-increasing mass of technical literature, ordinarily finds little time for 
reflection upon the real meaning of his work; he secures, in general, far too 
few opportunities of considering in a philosophical sort of way the past, present, 
and future of his own particular branch of scientific activity. It is not difficult 
to form a fairly accurate survey of the position to which Chemistry had attained 
a generation ago, perhaps even a few years ago; probably no intellect at 
present existing could pronounce judgment upon the present position of our 
science in terms which would commend themselves to the historian of the 
twenty-first century. Doubtless even one equipped with a complete knowledge 
of all that has been achieved, standing on the very frontier of scientific advance 
and peering into the surrounding darkness, would be quite incompetent to 
make any adeauate forecast of the conquests which will be made by chemical 
and physical science during the next fifty years. At the same time, chemical 
history tells us that progress is the result in large measure of imperfect attempts 
to appreciate the present and to forecast the future. I therefore propose to lay 
before you a sketch of the present position of certain branches of chemical 
knowledge and to discuss the directions in which progress is to be sought; none 
of us dare cherish the conviction that his views on such matters are correct, but 
everyone desirous of contributing towards the development of his science must 
attempt an appreciation of this kind. The importance to the worker and to 
the subject of free ventilation and discussion of the point of view taken by the 
individual can scarcely be over-estimated. 
The two sciences of Chemistry and Physics were at one time included as 
parts of the larger subject entitled Natural Philosophy, but in the early part 
of the nineteenth century they drew apart. Under the stimulus of Dalton’s 
atomic theory, Chemistry developed into a study of the interior of the molecule, 
and, as a result of the complication of the observed phenomena, progressed from 
stage to stage as a closely reasoned mass of observed facts and logical con- 
clusions. Physics, less entangled in its infancy with numbers of experimental 
data which apparently did not admit of quantitative correlation, was developed 
largely as a branch of applied mathematics; such achievements of the formal 
