6 President's address. 



wnik Babbage laid stress on the benefit which would accrue to pure 

 science by being brought into contact with practical life, scientific men 

 of the present day have more and more insisted on the services they, on 

 their part, are able to render to the industries. The idealistic motive 

 has thus given way to the materialistic purpose. Both aspects are 

 perhaps equally important, but it is necessary to insist, at the present 

 time, that the utilitarian drum can be beaten too loudly. There is more 

 than one point of contact between different activities of the human mind, 

 such as find expression in scientific pursuits or commercial enterprises, 

 and it is wrong to base the advantages to be derived from their mutual 

 influence solely, or even mainly, on the ground of material benefits. 



I need not press this point in a city which has given many proofs 

 that a business community may be prompted by higher motives than 

 those which affect their pockets. It was not for utilitarian objects 

 that repeated efforts were made since the year 1640 to establish a 

 University in Manchester ; it was not for reasons of material gain that 

 the Eoyal Institution and Owens College were founded; nor was it 

 because they increased the wealth of the district that the place of 

 honour in our Town Hall has been given to Dalton and Joule. 



When we glance at the various occupations of the working parts 

 of a nation, comprising the student who accumulates or extends 

 knowledge, the engineer who applies that knowledge, the geo- 

 logist or agriculturalist who discloses the store of wealth hidden in 

 the soil, the commercial man who distributes that wealth, it seems as 

 if we ought to be able to name the qualities of mtellect and tempera- 

 ment which in each pursuit are most needed to carry out the work 

 successfully. But on trying to define these qualities we soon discover 

 the formidable nature of the task. Eeasoning power, inventive power, 

 and sound balance of judgment are essential attributes in all cases, and 

 the problem is reduced to the question whether there are different 

 varieties of these attributes which can be assigned to the different occu- 

 pations. 



Among all subjects mathematics is perhaps the one that appears 

 most definitely to require a special and uncommon faculty. Yet, 

 Poincar6 — himself one of the clearest thinkers and most brilliant 

 exponents of the subject — almost failed when he attempted to fix the 

 distinguishing intellectual quahty of the mathematician. Starting from 

 the incontrovertible proposition that there is only one kind of correct 

 reasoning, which is logical reasoning, he raises the question why it is 

 that everybody who is capable of reasoning correctly is not also a 

 mathematician, and he is led to the conclusion that the characterizing 

 feature is a peculiar type of memory. It is not a better memory, for 

 some mathematicians are very forgetful, and many of them cannot add 



