THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 9 



when he addressed the Association from the chair, lie claimed a strong 

 advance in scientific and public opinion toward his views. Five years 

 later a concrete proposal for the creation of a Board of Science, possessing 

 ' at once authority and knowledge,' was put forward by the Parliamentary 

 Committee of this Association (a committee no longer existing) ; but our 

 Council at the time considered that the proposal had ' yet to receive 

 sanction from public opinion, and more especially from the opinion of 

 men of science themselves.' It was not, in fact, entirely owing to lack of 

 prevision on the side of successive Governments that the developments 

 which have been outlined were so long delayed. There was an element 

 of mutual distrust between Science and the State — now, it may happily 

 be believed, almost if not quite wholly removed. A strong body of scientific 

 opinion was avowedly afraid (as Sir George Airy phrased it) of ' organisa- 

 tions of any kind dependent on the State.' It is to be hoped that modern 

 developments have removed that fear. The progress of Science cannot be 

 kept wholly within training-walls, and no one wants to try to keep it so. 

 The waters of a river may be guided artificially to do the work of irriga- 

 tion ; but not at their sources, nor yet where, at the last, they percolate 

 the soil. The guidance of scientific research, in its inception, lies with the 

 genius of the individual ; its results for the future may lie far beyond the 

 realisation even of the scientific workers themselves. The Oxford Meeting 

 of the Association in 1894 supplies a simple example of this. There was a 

 discussion on flight, in the Section of Mathematics and Physics, opened by 

 Hiram Maxim ; and no less a leader in science than Kelvin afterwards 

 described Maxim's own flying machine as a child's perambulator with a 

 sunshade magnified eight times. Yet it was not many years before research 

 in aeronautics had become the care of the State as well as of the individual ; 

 and the work carried out before 1914 under (what is now) the Aeronautical 

 Research Committee led on to our wonderful development of aircraft 

 during the war. 



A recent report of the Committee of the Privy Council for Scientific 

 and Industrial Research shows that under the Department there are 

 eleven research boards, some of which direct the work of committees to 

 the number of three dozen in all. These boards co-ordinate and govern 

 researches in chemistry, fabrics, engineering, and physics, radio, building, 

 food-investigation, forest-products, and fuel ; and to these are to be added 

 the board of the Geological Survey and the executive committee of the 

 National Physical Laboratory. Under the general supervision of the 

 Advisory Council there are upwards of twenty industrial research associa- 



