ADDRESS OF PROFESSOR LOVERING. 613 
of this Association, of discussing some of the great themes of 
science before an audience which has for its nucleus the original 
investigators, discoverers, and inventors in the country, and which 
like the sun, is surrounded by an extensive chromosphere only a 
little less brilliant than the central body by contrast; and let my 
earnest endeavor be not to abuse or waste the great privilege. 
I am confronted on the very threshold of my address by the 
doubt whether it were better to beat out the little bit of golden 
thought, for which I have time and capacity, into a thin leaf 
Which shall merely gild the whole vast surface of scientific inves- 
tigation, even for a single year, or to condense it into a solid 
though minute globule, only big enough and bright enough to light 
up some narrow specialty. The general practice which prevails, 
of selecting a President alternately from the two principal sec- 
tions into which the Association is divided, will justify me in pay- 
mg my particular addresses to the physical sciences, knowing that 
the large and active department of Natural History will be prop- 
erly treated in its turn by those most competent to do it. Not 
“ven the capacious mind of a Goethe, a Humboldt, a Whewell, or a 
Herbert Spencer is large enough to give a decent shelter to all 
the subjects which come within the scope of this Association. At 
the same time I must say that I sympathize with the remarks 
made by President Hunt at Indianapolis, when he questioned the 
Propriety of excluding geology from the ranks of the physical 
Sciences ; only I would give them a still wider significance. Phys- 
Kal science is distinguished from natural history not so much by 
Subjects as its methods. In my imagination I can picture to 
myself all these subjects as being handled in the same masterly 
rasp of mechanics and mathematics by which the physical astron- 
omer holds in his hands the history and the destiny of the solar 
? ‘ystem, What is only a dream or a fancy now may become a 
reality to the science of the future. Why, asked Cuvier, may not 
cara history some day have its Newton: to whom the laws of 
circulation of the sap and the blood will be only as the laws of 
Jee BE With'such an endorser, I may venture to quote these 
_ “tds of a consummate mathematician without fear of their being 
ait aside by the naturalists as one of Bacon’s Idols of the Tribe. 
am tntelligence which at any given instant should know all the 
o by which nature is urged and the respective situations of the 
beings of which nature is composed, if, moreover, it were suffic- 
