August 25, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



235 



could have been expected. His alert and 

 bright personality suggested that many 

 happy years lay before him. All these fair 

 hopes were shattered in a moment by an 

 accident upon a "Welsh hillside; and his 

 friends, who were many, deplore his too 

 early death at the age of twenty-eight. 



The death of Mr. Frank McClean has 

 robbed astronomy of one of its most patient 

 workers and actively creative investigators. 

 I wish that my own knowledge could enable 

 me to give some not inadequate exposition 

 of his services to the science which he loved 

 so well. He was a man of great generosity 

 which was wise, discriminating and more 

 than modest ; to wide interests in science he 

 united wide interests in the fine arts. Your 

 astronomer royal, in the Royal Observatory 

 at Cape Town, will not lightly forget his 

 gift of a great telescope: and the Univer- 

 sity of Cambridge, the grateful recipient 

 of his munificent endowment of the Isaac 

 Newton studentships fifteen years ago, and 

 of his no less munificent bequest of manu- 

 scripts, early printed books, and objects of 

 art, has done what she can towards per- 

 petuating his memory for future genera- 

 tions by including his name in the list, that 

 is annually recited in solemn service, of her 

 benefactors who have departed this life. 



In the early days of our gatherings, when 

 the set of cognate sciences with w^hich we 

 specially are concerned had not yet di- 

 verged so widely from one another alike in 

 subject and in method, this inaugurating 

 address was characterized by a brevity that 

 a president can envy and by a freedom 

 from formality that even the least tolerant 

 audience could find admirable. The lapse 

 of time, perhaps assisted by presidential 

 ambitions which have been veiled under an 

 almost periodic apology for personal short- 

 comings, has deprived these addresses of 

 their ancient brevity, and has invested them 

 with an air of oracular gravity. The topics 



vary from year to year, but this variation 

 is due to the predilection of the individual 

 presidents ; the types of address are but 

 few in number. Sometimes, indeed, we 

 have had addresses that can not be ranged 

 under any comprehensive type. Thus one 

 year we had an account of a particular 

 school of long-sustained consecutive re- 

 search ; another year the president made a 

 constructive (and perhaps defiant) defence 

 of the merits of a group of subjects that 

 were of special interest to himself. But 

 there is one type of address which recurs 

 with iterated frequency ; it is constituted by 

 a general account of recent progress in dis- 

 covery, or by a survey of modern advances 

 in some one or other of the branches of 

 science to which the multiple activities of 

 our section are devoted. No modern presi- 

 dent has attempted a general survey of re- 

 cent progress in all the branches of our 

 group of sciences; such an attempt will 

 probably be deferred until the council dis- 

 covers a president who, endowed with the 

 omniscience of a Whewell, and graced with 

 the tongue of men and of angels, shall once 

 again unify our discussions. 



On the basis of this practise, it would 

 have been not unreasonable on my part to 

 have selected some topic from the vast 

 range of pure mathematics, and to have 

 expounded some body of recent investiga- 

 tions. There certainly is no lack of topics ; 

 our own day is peculiarly active in many 

 directions. Thus, even if we leave on one 

 side the general progress that has been 

 made in many of the large branches of 

 mathematics during recent years, it is easy 

 to hint at numerous subjects which could 

 occupy the address of a mathematical presi- 

 dent. He might, for instance, devote his 

 attention to modern views of continuity, 

 whether of quantity or of space ; he might 

 be heterodox or orthodox as to the so-called 

 laws of motion ; he might expound his 



