82 Proceedings of the British Association. 



assembled arouse, I can summon none more every way delightful 

 and cheering than the contemplation of that mutual regard. It is 

 therefore, with no common feelings that I find myself now placed in 

 this chair, as the representative of such a body as the British Asso- 

 ciation, and as the successor of such a friend and of such a man as 

 its late President. 



Gentlemen, — There are many sources of pride and satisfaction, in 

 which self has no place, which crowd upon a Cambridge man in 

 revisiting for a second time this University, as the scene of our annual 

 labours. The developement of its material splendour which has 

 taken place in that interval of twelve years, vast and noble as it has 

 been, has been more than kept pace with by the triumphs of its in- 

 tellect, the progress of its system of instruction, and the influence of 

 that progress on the public mind and the state of science in England. 

 When I look at the scene around me — when I see the way in which 

 our Sections are officered in so many instances by Cambridge men, not 

 out of mere compliment to the body which receives us, but for the 

 intrinsic merit of the men, and the pre-eminence which the general 

 voice of society accords them in there several departments — when I 

 think of the large proportion of the muster-roll of science which is 

 filled by Cambridge names, and when, without going into any details, 

 and confining myself to only one branch of public instruction, I look 

 back to the vast and extraordinary developement in the state of 

 mathematical cultivation and power in this University, as evidenced 

 both in its examinations and in the published works of its members, 

 now, as compared with what it was in my own time — I am left at no 

 loss to account for those triumphs and that influence to which I have 

 alluded. It has ever been, and I trust it ever will continue to be, the 

 pride and boast of this University to maintain, at a conspicuously 

 high level, that sound and thoughtful and sobering discipline of mind 

 which mathematical studies imply. Independent of the power which 

 such studies confer as instruments of investigation, there never was a 

 period in the history of science in which their moral influence, if I 

 may so term it, was more needed, as a corrective to that propensity 

 which is beginning to prevail widely, and, I fear, banefully, over large 

 departments of our philosophy, the propensity to crude and overhasty 

 generalization. To all such propensities the steady concentration of 



