42 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIX. No. 993 



of 1916-17 in New York. It was further 

 recommended that the New York meeting 

 be a special meeting in which all affiliated 

 societies should be invited to take part and 

 that such general convocation-week meet- 

 ings should be held at intervals of four 

 years, the second to be in Chicago in 1920- 

 1921. 



At its last meeting the council passed a 

 resolution extending its warmest apprecia- 

 tion and thanks to the local committee, to 

 the citizens of Atlanta and all those who 

 contributed so ably and willingly to the 

 comfort and entertainment of the members. 



Atlanta has been called the metropolis of 

 the "New South" and those visitors who 

 found time to visit some of its many inter- 

 esting places and institutions went away 

 with new impressions that were not the 

 least assets of a most enjoyable and success- 

 ful meeting. 



H. "W. Springsteen, 

 General Secretary. 



THE METHODS OF THE PHYSICAL SCI- 

 ENCES. TO WHAT ABE THEY 

 APPLICABLE?! 



It is generally expected that a retiring 

 vice-president shall deal in his retiring 

 address with one of two things, either some 

 aspects of his own work or some of the im- 

 portant questions which are agitating his 

 own branch of science. My excuse for do- 

 ing neither of these is that I do not feel 

 that my own researches are of sufficient 

 general interest for mention at this time, 

 and that the masterly address of Professor 

 Millikan last year on the theory of quanta 

 had made it impossible for me to add any- 

 thing to perhaps the most important of 

 the recent new developments in physical 

 theory. In deciding to content myself with 



1 Address of the vice-president and chairman 

 of Section B — Physics — American Association for 

 the Advancement of Science, Atlanta, December, 

 1913. 



some general observations I find that I 

 have exposed myself to two risks, one that 

 of repeating ideas that I have before ex- 

 pressed, the other that of seeming to have 

 borrowed from the very interesting and 

 fruitful address of Sir Oliver Lodge at the 

 recent meeting of the British Association. 

 We physicists may certainly look vdth 

 satisfaction at the present condition of 

 our science, for although it finds itself in 

 a period of violent flux involving the possi- 

 bility of the discarding or modifying of 

 some of our most cherished notions, it still 

 remains as the model for the other sciences, 

 many of which it logically includes in it- 

 self. When we speak of the methods of 

 physical science, we of course mean the 

 experimental method, as that is what dis- 

 tinguishes modem science from that of 

 antiquity, but we include not only the 

 methods and instruments of observation 

 but also our methods of thought and reason- 

 ing. If we are to class sciences by the 

 instruments used, we shall find most of 

 them to belong under physics. Thusastron- 

 omy, so long confined to the study of the 

 positions of the stars in two coordinates on 

 the heavenly sphere, made use almost ex- 

 clusively of the telescope and the clock, as 

 important in the physical laboratory as in 

 the observatory, while the modem part of 

 astronomy annexes to the telescope the 

 spectroscope and the photometer, the bolo- 

 meter with its attendant galvanometer and 

 the most recent developments of the physi- 

 cal laboratory in measuring radiation, in- 

 cluding the recently discovered liberation 

 of electrons from metals by light. For over 

 a century chemistry has depended upon 

 the physical balance as its chief instru- 

 ment of measurement, while to-day the 

 chemist uses the thermometer and calori- 

 meter, the manometer for gas and osmotic 

 pressures, and all the instruments for the 

 measurement of electrical current and dif- 

 ference of potential that the physical labo- 



