4 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
debtor to his profession, from which he gains countenance and profit. 
That Brewster was an ornament to his is acknowledged by every lover 
of learning. That he endeavoured to be a help. to it was gratefully 
recognised during his lifetime. After his death it was said of him that 
the improved position of men of science in our time is chiefly due to 
his exertions and his example. 
I am naturally led to connect the meeting of 1850 with a still more 
memorable gathering of this Association in this city. In August 1871— 
just over half a century ago—the British Association again assembled in 
Edinburgh under the presidency of Lord Kelvin—then Sir William 
Thomson. It was an historic occasion by reason of the address which 
inaugurated its proceedings. Lord Kelvin, with characteristic force and 
insistence, still further elaborated the theme which had been so signal 
a feature of Sir David Brewster’s address twenty years previously : 
‘ Whether we look to the honour of England,’ he said, ‘ as a nation which 
ought always to be the foremost in promoting physical science, or to 
those vast economical advantages which must accrue from such estab- 
lishments, we cannot but feel that experimental research ought to be 
made with us an object of national concern, and not left, as hitherto, 
exclusively to the private enterprise of self-sacrificing amateurs, and 
the necessarily inconsecutive action of our present Governmental 
Departments and of casual committees.’ 
Lord Kelvin, as might have been anticipated, pleaded more especi- 
ally for the institution of physical observatories and laboratories for 
experimental research, to be conducted by qualified persons, whose 
duties should be not teaching, but experimenting. Such institutions 
as then existed, he pointed out, only afforded a very partial and inade- 
quate solution of a national need. They were, for the most part, 
‘absolutely destitute of means, material, or personnel for advancing 
science, except at the expense of volunteers, or of securing that volun- 
teers should be found to continue such little work as could then be 
carried on.’ 
There were, however, even then, signs that the bread cast upon the 
waters was slowly returning after many days. The establishment of 
the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, by the munificence of its then 
Chancellor, was a notable achievement. Whilst in its constitution 
as part of a university discipline it did not wholly realise the ideal of the 
two Presidents, under its successive directors, Prof. Clerk-Maxwell, the 
late Lord Rayleigh, and Sir J. J. Thomson, it has exerted a profound in- 
fluence upon the development of experimental physics, and has inspired 
the foundation of many similar educational institutions in this country. 
Experimental physics has thus received an enormous impetus during the 
last fifty years, and although in matters of science there is but little 
folding of the hands to sleep, ‘the divine discontent’ of its followers 
