1885.] 



President's Address. 



291 



Nor shall I be charged with innovation if I add that there is no 

 reason to suspect that the future will bring with it any retardation in 

 the advance of science. The adverse influences, which, in the middle 

 ages, arrested the work commenced by the older Greek philosophers, 

 are so much weakened that they no longer offer any serious obstacle to 

 the growth of natural knowledge ; while they are powerless to prevent 

 the extension of scientific methods of inquiry and the application of 

 scientific conceptions to all the problems with which the human mind 

 is confronted. If any prophecy is safe of fulfilment, it is that, in the 

 twentieth century, the influence of these methods and conceptions 

 will be incomparably greater than it is now ; and that the inter- 

 penetration of science with the common affairs of life, which is so 

 marked a feature of our time, will be immeasurably closer. For good 

 or for evil, we have passed into a new epoch of human history — the 

 age of science. 



It may seem superfluous that I should adduce evidence in support of 

 propositions which must have so much of the nature of truisms to 

 you who are sharers in the work of science and daily witnesses of the 

 effects of its productive energy. But the proverbial tendency of 

 familiarity to be incompatible with due respect is noticeable even in 

 our appreciation of the most important truths, and our strongest con- 

 victions need furbishing up now and then, if they are to retain their 

 proper influence. I certainly cannot accuse myself of ever having 

 consciously entertained a low estimate of the past work or the future 

 progress of science ; but, a few months ago, enforced leisure and the 

 attainment of an age when retrospection tends to become a habit, not 

 to say a foible, led me to look at the facts anew ; and I must confess 

 that the ■ spectacle of the marvellous development of science, alike in 

 theory and practice, within my own life-time, appeared to me to 

 justify a faith, even more robust than mine, in its future greatness. 



For, if I do not greatly err, the greater part of the vast body of 

 knowledge which constitutes the modern sciences of physics, chemistry, 

 biology, and geology has been acquired, and the widest generalisations 

 therefrom have been deduced, within the last sixty years ; and fur- 

 thermore, the majority of those applications to scientific knowledge to 

 practical ends, which have brought about the most striking differences 

 between our present civilisation and that of antiquity, have been 

 made within that period of time. 



To begin with the latter point — the practical achievements of 

 science. The first railway for locomotives, which was constructed 

 between Stockton and Darlington, was opened in September, 1825, so 

 that I have the doubtful advantage of about four months' seniority 

 over the ancestral representative of the vast reticulated fetching and 

 carrying organism which now extends its meshes over the civilised 

 world. I confess it fills me with astonishment to think that the time 



