TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 



Section A. — Mathematical and Physical Science. 



President op the Section: Professor A. Gray, M.A., LL.D FES 



F.E.S.E. 



TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9. 



The President delivered the following Address : — 



I HAVE devoted some little time to the perusal of the Addresses of my pre- 

 decessors in this Chair. These have a wide range. They include valuable 

 philosophical discussions of the nature of scientific knowledge and exposition.s 

 of scientific method, ae well as highly instructive resumes and appreciations of 

 the progress of mathematics and physics. But as this is the first meeting of 

 the British Association since the conclusion of peace I have decided to disregard 

 in the main these precedents, and to endeavour to point out, in the first place, 

 some of the lessons which the war has, or ought to have, taught our country 

 and those who direct its policy, and in particular ourselves, whose vocation it 

 is to cultivate and to teach mathematical and physical science. 



Before proceeding with this task I must refer to the loss which physical 

 science and the British Association have suffered this year through the deaths 

 of Professor Carey Foster and Lord Rayleigh. Both of these great physicists 

 were regular in attendance at the meetings of the Association, and they will 

 be greatly missed. 



What Carey Foster was as a man of science, as a teacher, and as a friend of 

 all students of physics, has been worthily set forth in the columns of Nature, 

 with all the knowledge and affectionate reverence of one who was at once his 

 pupil and his fellow-worker at University College. To that eloquent tribute I 

 will not, though I knew Carey Foster well, venture to add a word. 



I shall not attempt to appraise here the work of Lord Rayleigh. But I may say 

 that for something like half a century his name has stood not only, for things that 

 are great in physical discovery, but for sanity of judgment, and clarity, elegance, 

 and soundness of treatment of outstanding and difficult problems of mathe- 

 matical physics. His researches, too, in experimental science have been fruitful 

 in results of the utmost importance in chemistry as well as in physics. With 

 him there was no shirking of the toil of monotonous and systematic observation 

 from day to day, in the pursuit of the greatest attainable accuracy : take, for 

 example, his work on electrical units. But his influence on applied mathematics 

 has a/lso been enormous, and places him for all time in the foremost rank of the 

 great physical mathematicians, at the head of which stands Isaac Newton. 

 One has only to read his Treatise on the Theory of Sound, and his papers on 

 Optics and Wave Theory, to find some of the mo.st striking examples in all 

 scientific literature of the working of a mind not only of the first order of 

 originality, but imbued with a feeling for symmetry of form and clearness of 

 exposition. 



Lord Rayleigh's genius was, it seems to me, essentially intuitive and prac- 

 tical. Though he was not given to any striving after the utmost rigidity of 

 formal proof, which, as he himself remarked, might not be more but less 

 demonstrative to the physicist than physical reasons, no man made fewer 

 mistakes. He is gone, but he has left an inspiring example to his order and to 

 his countrymen of a long life consecrated to the object for which the Royal 



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