466 
tion, a large share of the burden of the 
Association’s work. How great that share 
was is perhaps especially known to the 
many men, among whom I am proud to 
count myself, who during his long term of 
office served in succession with him as 
brother General Secretary. In 1895, at 
Ipswich, he left the post of General Secre- 
tary, but only to become President. So 
long and so constantly did he labor for the 
good of the Association that he seemed to 
be an integral part of it, and meeting as we 
do to-day, and as we henceforward must 
do, without Douglas Galton, we feel some- 
thing greatly missing. This year, perhaps 
even more than in other years, we could 
have wished him to be among us; for to- 
day the Association may look with joy, not 
unmixed with pride, on the realization of a 
project in forwarding which it has had a con- 
spicuous share, on the commencement of an 
undertaking which is not only a great thing 
in itself, but which, we trust, is the begin- 
ning of still greater things to come. And 
the share which the Association has had in 
this was largely Sir Douglas Galton’s doing. 
In his address as President of Section A, 
at the meeting of the Association at Cardiff 
in 1891, Professor Oliver Lodge expounded 
with pregnant words how urgently, not 
pure science only, but industry and the 
constructive arts—for the interests of these 
are ever at bottom the same—needed the 
aid of some national establishment for the 
prosecution of prolonged and costly physical 
researches, which private enterprise could 
carry out in a lame fashion only, if at all. 
Lodge’s words found an echo in many men’s 
minds; but the response was for a long 
while in men’s minds only. In 1895, Sir 
Douglas Galton, having previously made a 
personal study of an institution analogous 
to the one desired—namely, the Reichsan- 
stalt at Berlin—seized the opportunity of- 
fered to him as President of the Association 
at Ipswich to insist, with the authority not 
SCIENCE. 
[N. S. Vou. X. No. 249. 
only of the head for the time being of a 
great scientific body, but also of one who 
himself knew the ways and wants at once 
of science and of practical life, that the 
thing which Lodge and others had hoped 
for was a thing which could be done, and 
ought to be done at once. And now to-day 
we can say it hasbeen done. The National 
Physical Laboratory has been founded. 
The address at Ipswich marked the begin- 
ning of an organized effort which has at 
last been crowned with success. A feeling 
of sadness cannot but come over us when 
we think that Sir Douglas Galton was not 
spared to see the formal completion of the 
scheme whose birth he did so much to 
help, and which, to his last days, he aided 
in more ways than one. It is the old 
story—the good which men do lives after 
them. 
Still older than the Association is this 
nineteenth century, now swiftly drawing to 
its close. Though the century itself has 
yet some sixteen months to run, this is the 
last meeting of the British Association 
which will use the numbers eighteen hun- 
dred to mark its date. 
The eyes of the young look ever forward ; 
they take little heed of the short though 
ever-lengthening fragment of life which 
lies behind them ; they are wholly bent on 
that which is to come. The eyes of the 
aged turn wistfully again and again to the 
past ; as the old glide down the inevitable 
slope their present becomes a living over 
again the life which has gone before, and 
the future takes on the shape of a brief 
lengthening of the past. May I this even- 
ing venture to give rein to the impulses of 
advancing years? May I, at this last meet- 
ing of the Association in the eighteen hun- 
dreds, dare to dwell for a while upon the 
past, and to call to mind a few of the 
changes which have taken place in the 
world since those autumn days in which 
men were saying to each other that the last 
