2 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 



bearer. In no other capacity dare I venture to address you. It was 

 once said by a literary man of some distinction that the man of science 

 appears to be the only man in the world who has something to say, and 

 he is the only man who does not know how to say it. There is an obvious 

 rejoinder, that the man of letters frequently has nothing to say, but says 

 it at great length. I dare not claim to be a man of science. I can only 

 hope that I shall not be deemed to-night to have qualified for consideration 

 as a man of letters in the sense of that retort. 



The honour which has been conferred upon me is the greater because 

 of the special significance which attaches to my year of office. It is the 

 year of the keenly anticipated second visit of the British Association 

 for the Advancement of Science to South Africa, and for that reason my 

 first words to-night are, happily, words of welcome. Not merely the 

 Association for which I speak, but all South Africa, rejoices in the presence 

 of the British Association and its distinguished members. To its parent 

 body, which can look back upon all but a century of glorious achievement, 

 this stripling Association brings its tribute of respectful admiration and 

 goodwill. To the great organisation of scientific men, the history of 

 which is the history of the advancement of Science in Britain, which has 

 a Presidential Roll adorned by names such as Brewster and Tyndall, 

 Huxley and Kelvin, Rayleigh and Lister, this land of ours, mindful of 

 its debt to Science, conscious of the gifts that Science can yet bring to it, 

 extends the hand of friendship, in gratitude for the honour of this visit, 

 and in appreciation of the stimulus to its progress and development 

 which must needs attend it. 



We have reason, indeed, to be grateful to the British Association for 

 its achievement and its significance. If I might select three distinctive 

 features in its record, they would be these. First, its contribution, direct 

 and indirect, to those great triumphs of British Science in the nineteenth 

 century which are the possession not of an age, nor of a nation, but of all 

 time and of every land. Directly it has initiated, correlated, and contri- 

 buted towards work of great scientific value ; indirectly it has inspired 

 much constructive activity, while its meetings year after year have done 

 more than any other single factor to stimulate and hasten the onward 

 march of science. 



Next I would dwell on its maintenance of a broad view of the scope 

 and function of Science, and, coupled with that, the emphasis laid by it 

 on the essential homogeneity of Science conceived thus broadly, and the 

 interdependence of its several branches. The Association had no lack 



