14 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 



appointed its first head. What it has become in his hands and the 

 hands of his successor, Sir Joseph Petavel, does not need to be told. 

 From small beginnings it has grown to be an influential factor in 

 the world's scientific progress, and a legitimate subject of national 

 pride. 



Another by-product of quite a diff'erent sort is the memorial to 

 Charles Darwin which we hold as trustee of the nation and of all 

 nations. At our meeting in 1927 the President, Sir Arthur Keith, 

 spoke in his address of the house where Darwin lived and worked, 

 pointing out how admirably it would serve as a monument of the 

 great naturalist. No sooner was the suggestion published than 

 a donor came forward whose devotion to the memory of Darwin 

 expressed itself in a noble gift. Sir Buckston Browne not only 

 bought and endowed Down House, but arranged with pious care 

 that the house and its grounds should exhibit, so far as was possible, 

 the exact environment of Darwin's life. The pilgrims who now 

 visit this shrine in their thousands see Darwin's study as it was 

 when the master thought and wrote, and can reconstruct the habit 

 of his days. There could not be a more appropriate memorial. 

 Its custody by the Association involves obligations which are by no 

 means small, and we may claim that they are worthily fulfilled. 



One may safely say that there is no department of scientific 

 endeavour our meetings have not aided, no important step in the 

 procession of discovery they have not chronicled. It was at our 

 meeting of 1856 that Bessemer first announced his process of 

 making a new material — what we now call mild steel — by blowing 

 air through melted pig iron. Produced in that way, or by the 

 later method of the regenerative furnace and the open hearth, it 

 soon revolutionised the construction of railways, bridges, boilers, 

 ships, and machinery of all sorts, and it now supplies the architect 

 with skeletons which he clothes with brick and stone and concrete. 

 It was at the Oxford meeting of 1894 that Lodge demonstrated 

 a primitive form of wireless telegraph based on the experiments 

 of Hertz, a precursor of the devices that were brought into use a 

 little later through the practical skill and indefatigable enterprise 

 of Marconi. At the same meeting there was an epoch-making 

 announcement by the late Lord Rayleigh. His patient weighings 

 of the residual gas which was found after depriving air of all its 

 oxygen led him to the discovery of argon. That was a surprise 

 of the first magnitude ; it was the herald, one may say, of the new 

 physics. Next year his colleague Ramsay presented other members 

 of the family of inert gases. It is curious to recall the indifference 

 and scepticism with which these really great discoveries were 

 received. Some of the chemists of that day seem to have had no 

 use for inert gases. But the stones which the builders were at first 



