pbesident's address. 



fundamental principles and with vast numbers. Over three hundred 

 years ago Spenser in the ' Faerie Queene ' compared ' the seas abundant 

 progeny ' with ' the starres on hy,' and recent investigations show that a 

 litre of sea-water may contain more than a hundred times as many living 

 organisms as there are stars visible to the eye on a clear night. 



During the past quarter of a century great advances have been 

 made in the science of the sea, and the aspects and prospects of sea- 

 fisheries research have undergone changes which encourage the hope 

 that a combination of the work now carried on by hydrographers and 

 biologists in most civilised countries on fundamental problems of the 

 ocean may result in a more rational exploitation and administration 

 of the fishing industries. 



And yet even at your former Cardiff Meeting thirty years ago there 

 were at least three papers of oceanographic interest — one by Professor 

 Osborne Eeynolds on the action of waves and currents, another by 

 Dr. H. E. Mill on seasonal variation in the temperature of lochs and 

 estuaries, and the third by our Honorary Local Secretary for the present 

 meeting, Dr. Evans Hoyle, on a deep-sea tow-net capable of being opened 

 and closed under water by the electric current. 



It was a notable meeting in several other respects, of which I shall 

 merely mention two. In Section A, Su- Oliver Lodge gave the historic 

 address in which he expounded the urgent need, in the interests of both 

 science and the industries, of a national institution for the promotion 

 of physical research on a large scale. Lodge's pregnant idea put forward 

 at this Cardiff Meeting, supported and still further elaborated by Sir 

 Douglas Galton as President of the Association at Ipswich, has since 

 borne notable fiiiit in the establishment and rapid development of the 

 National Physical Laboratory. The other outstanding event of that 

 meeting is that you then appointed a committee of eminent geologists 

 and naturalists to consider a project for boring through a coral reef, and 

 that led during following years to the successive expeditions to the 

 atoll of Funafuti in the Central Pacific, the results of which, reported 

 upon eventually by the Royal Society, were of great interest alike to 

 geologists, biologists, and oceanographers. 



Dr. Huggins, on taking the Chair in 1891, remarked that it was over 

 thirty years since the Association had honoured Astronomy in the 

 selection of its President. It might be said that the case of Oceano- 

 graphy is harder, as the Association has never had an Oceanographer 

 as President — and the Association might well reply ' Because until very 

 recent years there has been no Oceanographer to have. ' If Astronomy 

 is the oldest of the sciences, Oceanography is probably the youngest. 

 Depending as it does upon the methods and results of other sciences, 

 it was not until our knowledge of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology was 



