Septembeb 20, 1901.] 



SCIENCE. 



427 



admiration, respect, nay, of the affection, in 

 which we all hold him. 



I have already mentioned a number of 

 circumstances which make our meeting 

 this year noteworthy ; to these I must add 

 that for the first time we have a Section 

 for Education, and the importance of this 

 new departure, due largely to the energy 

 of Professor Armstrong, is emphasized by 

 the fact that the Chair of that Section will 

 be occupied by the Vice-President of the 

 Committee of Council on Education — Sir 

 John Gorst. I will not attempt to forecast 

 the proceedings of the new Section. Edu- 

 cation is passing through a transitional 

 stage. The recent debates in Parliament ; 

 the great gifts of Mr. Carnegie ; the discus- 

 sion as to university organization in the 

 north of England ; the reconstitution of the 

 University of London ; the increasing im- 

 portance attached to the application of 

 knowledge both to the investigation of na- 

 ture and to the purposes of industry, are all 

 evidence of the growing conviction that 

 without advance in education we cannot re- 

 tain our position among the nations of the 

 world. If the British Association can pro- 

 vide a platform on which these matters may 

 be discussed in a scientific but practical 

 spirit, free from the misrepresentations of 

 the hustings and the exaggerations of the 

 partisan, it will contribute in no slight 

 measure to the national welfare. 



But amid the old and new activities of 

 our meeting the undertone of sadness, which 

 is never absent from such gatherings, will 

 be painfully apparent to many of us at 

 Glasgow. The life-work of Professor Tait 

 has ended amid the gloom of the war- 

 cloud. A bullet, fired thousands of miles 

 away, struck him to the heart, so that in 

 their deaths the father and the brave son, 

 whom he loved so well, were not long di- 

 vided. Within the last j^ear, too, America 

 has lost Kowland ; Viriamu Jones, who did 

 yeoman's service for education and for sci- 



ence, has succumbed to a long and painful 

 illness ; and one who last year at Bradford 

 seconded the proposal that I should be your 

 president at Glasgow, and who would un- 

 questionably have occupied this chair be- 

 fore long had he been spared to do so, has 

 unexpectedly been called away. A few 

 months ago we had no reason to doubt that 

 George Francis FitzGerald had many years 

 of health and work before him. He had 

 gained in a remarkable way not only the 

 admiration of the scientific world, but the 

 affection of his friends, and we shall miss 

 sadly one whom we all cared for, and who, 

 we hoped, might yet add largely to the 

 achievements which had made him famous. 



THE SCIENCE OF THE NINETEENTH CEN- 

 TURY. 



Turning from these sad thoughts to the 

 retrospect of the century which has so 

 lately ended, I have found it to be impos- 

 sible to free myself from the influence of 

 the moment and to avoid, even if it were 

 desirable to avoid, the inclination to look 

 backward from the standpoint of to-day. 



Two years ago Sir Michael Foster dealt 

 with the work of the century as a whole. 

 Last year Sir William Turner discussed in 

 greater detail the growth of a single branch 

 of science. A third and humbler task re- 

 mains, viz., to fix our attention on some of 

 the hypotheses and assumptions on which 

 the fabric of modern theoretical science 

 has been built, and to inquire whether the 

 foundations have been so ' well and truly ' 

 laid that they may be trusted to sustain 

 the mighty superstructure which is being 

 raised upon them. 



The moment is opportune. The three 

 chief conceptions which for many years 

 have dominated physical as distinct from 

 biological science have been the theories of 

 the existence of atoms, of the mechanical 

 nature of heat, and of the existence of the 

 ether. 



