1879.] 



President's Address. 



421 



of advance. M. Becquerel, as is well known, succeeded some years 

 ago in producing natural colours by the agency of light ; one speci- 

 men of which, a solar spectrum, was given to me some three years 

 since by M. Cornn, and which, through being carefully preserved in a 

 tin box, retains all its chromatic features. Captain Abney has now 

 taken up the subject again, and believes it probable that the colours 

 obtained by this process may be preserved unchanged when exposed 

 to ordinary daylight. His suggestion as to the physical causes of the 

 colour is interesting, and leads us to hope that we may hear more upon 

 the subject. 



It was at one time thought that Science and practical life were 

 essentially distinct, and that in their cares and their purposes, in 

 their sorrows and their joys, neither intermeddled with the other. 

 But in proportion as it has been gradually recognised that Science, 

 and even Philosophy itself, is based upon experience, so has their 

 distinction gradually faded from our view. And, among many other 

 instances of forecasts in this direction by far-seeing men, I may 

 adduce the dream of Babbage, that mathematical calculation might be 

 reduced to mechanism, and that the data of many problems both of 

 physics and of life might be handed over to an engine which would 

 work out the results. That dream of his was as nearly realised as any 

 dream of his ever could be realised ; for the merit and the charm of the 

 man himself, and the fascination which he threw about all his projects, 

 were derived from the fact that, at whatever rate realisation followed, 

 his ideas flew faster and faster still and outstripped them all. And if, 

 in the machinery for complicated calculation designed by the brothers 

 Thomson, much more has been actually achieved than ever before, it is 

 not because this is a generation of more feeble folk, or because there 

 has been any lack of elasticity of mind or of fertility in idea, but 

 because their minds and their ideas have been more under control, 

 and because these men have succeeded in that which their great pre- 

 decessor always missed, namely, mastery over themselves. 



The relations between the Mechanism of the Heavens and the 

 History of the Earth have for some years past been the subject of 

 speculation and of argument amongst many prominent men of 

 science. And calculations have been made, tending more or less 

 to confirm the views of the various writers on the subject. But so 

 vast is the problem, so multifarious in its data, so complicated in its 

 laws, that eager as we are to grasp anything solid or well founded in 

 the inquiry, we are constantly left with a feeling that we may have 

 clutched at a mere floating weed, when we hoped that we had laid 

 hold of something firmly rooted. And on this account we may look 

 with unusual satisfaction at the massive and philosophical research in 

 which Mr. George Darwin is engaged, and of which we have already 

 some substantial instalments. It consists in an investigation on the 



