386 



SCIENCE. 



[X. S. VoL.XVlII. No. 456 



for hoping that the improvement in the 

 position of science in this country which 

 we owe to the one will also be the care of 

 his successor, who has honored the Asso- 

 ciation by accepting the unanimous nomi- 

 nation of your council to be your President 

 next year, an acceptance which adds a new 

 lustre to this chair. 



On this we may congratulate ourselves all 

 the more because I think, although it is 

 not generally recognized, that the century 

 into which we have now well entered may 

 be more momentous than any which 

 has preceded it, and that the present 

 history of the world is being so largely 

 moulded by the influence of brain- 

 power, which in these modern days has 

 to do with natural as well as human 

 forces and laws, that statesmen and politi- 

 cians will have in the future to pay more 

 regard to education and science, as empire- 

 builders and empire-guarders, than they 

 have paid in the past. 



The nineteenth century will ever be 

 known as the one in which the influences of 

 science were first fully realized in civilized 

 communities; the scientific progress was so 

 gigantic that it seems rash to predict that 

 any of its successors can be more important 

 in tke life of any nation. 



Disraeli, in 1873, referring to the prog- 

 ress up to that year, spoke as follows: 

 "How much has happened in these fifty 

 years — a period more remarkable than any, 

 I will venture to say, in the annals of man- 

 kind. I am not thinking of the rise and 

 fall of Empires, the change of dynasties, 

 the establishment of Governments. I am 

 thinking of those revolutions of science 

 which have had much more effect than any 

 political causes, which have changed the 

 position and prospects of mankind more 

 than all the conquests and all the codes and 

 all the legislators that ever lived. ' '* 



'■ yatiire, November 27, 1873, Vol. IX., p. 71. 



The progress of science, indeed, brings in 

 many considerations which are momentous 

 in relation to the life of any limited com- 

 munity—any one nation. One of these 

 considerations to which attention is now 

 being greatly drawn is that a relative de- 

 cline in national wealth derived from in- 

 dustries must follow relative neglect of 

 scientific education. 



It was the late Prince Consort who first 

 emphasized this when he came here fresh 

 from the University of Bonn. Hence the 

 'Prince Consort's Committee,' which led 

 to the foundation of the College of Chemis- 

 try and afterwards of the Science and Art 

 Department. From that time to this the 

 warnings of our men of science have become 

 louder and more urgent in each succeeding 

 j^ear. But this is not all; the commercial 

 output of one country in one century as 

 compared with another is not alone in ques- 

 tion ; the acquirement of the scientific spirit 

 and a knowledge and utilization of the 

 forces of Nature are very much further 

 reaching in their effects on the progress and 

 decline of nations than is generally imag- 

 ined. 



Britain in the middle of the last cen- 

 tury was certainly the country which 

 gained most by the advent of science, for 

 she was then in full possession of those ma- 

 terial gifts of Nature, coal and iron, the 

 combined winning and utilization of which, 

 in the production of machinery and in other 

 ways, soon made her the richest country 

 in the world, the seat and throne of inven- 

 tion and manufacture, as Mr. Carnegie has 

 called her. Being the great producers and 

 exporters of all kinds of manufactured 

 goods, we became eventually, with oiir iron 

 ships, the great carriers, and hence the su- 

 premacy of our mercantile marine and our 

 present command of the sea. 



The most fundamental change wrought 

 by the early applications of science was in 



