336. Address of Sir Wm. Thomson at the Glasgow Meeting, 
Art. XL.—Address at the Glasgow Meeting of the British Asso- 
ciation; by Professor Str WiLL1AM THomson, President of 
the Mathematical and Physical Section. 
A CONVERSATION which I had with Professor Newcomb one 
evening last June, in Professor Henry’s drawing-room in the 
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, has forced me to give all 
my spare thoughts ever since to Hopkins’s problem of Preces- 
sion and Nutation, assuming the earth a rigid spheroidal shell 
filled with liquid. Six weeks ago, when I landed in England 
after a most interesting trip to America and back, and became 
painfully conscious that I must have the honor to address you 
here to-day, I wished to write an address of which science 0 
America should be the subject. I came home, indeed, vividly 
Impressed with much that I had seen, both in the Great Exhibt- 
tion of Philadelphia and out of it, showing the truest scientific 
spirit and devotion, the originality, the inventiveness, the 
patient persevering thoroughness of work, the appreciativeness, 
and the generous openmindedness and sympathy, from which 
the great things of science come. 
Qéd oo Aéyery ‘Ar perdas 
‘ a” 
Oér@ dé Kvd pov adeiv. 
