6 Anniversary Address by Prof. C. S. Sherrington. 



passed to one who has been a member of Council on many occasions, a 

 Foreign Secretary, and Secretary, our sometime President, Sir Archibald 

 Greikie, known among us also as the genial historian of the Eoyal Society Club. 



It is little more than two years since the death of the late Lord 

 Eayleigh, and this afternoon in Westminster Abbey there has been unveiled 

 the tablet to his memory, given by subscribers from this Society and from 

 the University of Cambridge, of which he was Chancellor. At the presen- 

 tation ceremony the Society and the donors generally were represented by 

 the Chairman of the Memorial Committee, Sir Joseph Thomson. The 

 Society will feel it peculiarly appropriate that their representative on such an 

 occasion should be one so closely associated with the late Lord Eayleigh in 

 the Society, in the University which was their common alma mater, and in 

 the domain of physical science itself. The recollection of the late Lord 

 Eayleigh's personality is present with us all : to meet him was to receive 

 the impression of true greatness. The legend on the mural tablet runs : — 

 " An unerring leader in the advancement of Natural Knowledge!' To-day has 

 seen the fulfilment of a fitting tribute, in a fitting resting-place, to a memory 

 veneration for which the lapse of time will but intensify. 



The Bakerian Lecture of the year was by Dr. T. M. Lowry and Mr. P. C. 

 Austin on " Optical Eotatory Dispersion." The Croonian Lecture was by 

 Dr. Henry Head. It had for its theme the disturbance of action in the 

 nervous system due to the impairment of one part reacting on the function 

 of another. Not unnoteworthy concerning the lecture is that, to push 

 further the enquiries underlying it, the lecturer had subjected to surgical 

 severance and restitching nerves of his own arm. 



To Dr. Head the Society owes a most acceptable gift. The Society 

 possessed no portrait of Lord Lister. Dr. Head, on learning this year that 

 such was the case, offered to the Society a portrait of Lister, by Legros, in 

 black and white, a portrait that had been given to Dr. Head by the poet 

 Henley, in whose possession it long was, — Henley, the poet whose word- 

 portrayal of Lister, under whom he was a patient, is extant in the famous 

 sonnet familiar to us all. The gift was gratefully accepted by Council. 



The Anniversary Meeting is naturally an occasion for retrospect; it is also 

 one which invites some thought to the present. The present time has in it 

 an element of considerable anxiety for those who regard the prosperity of 

 Science. Although the recent past has, it is true, been not unfavourable. 



I mentioned just now a university building, the earliest constructed for 

 systematic experimental teaching in Physics, and that just 50 years ago. It 

 is a satisfaction to note the multiplication of such laboratories since then. 

 This year at the inauguration in London of the Institute of Physics Sir Joseph 



