1895.] 



President's Address. 



109 



half of it having been passed through the press by the author with 

 notes and references, and the remainder simply reprinted from the 

 original publications. Matter for five more such volumes remains 

 to be reprinted. 



At the good old age of ninety-seven the veteran Franz Ernst 

 Neumann has left us. He has been one of the most profound and 

 fertile of all the workers in mathematical physics of the 19th 

 century. I remember with gratitude the admirable and suggestive 

 theorem* on electromagnetic induction which I learned in 1848, from 

 a first paper on the subject which he had communicated to the Berlin 

 Academy of Sciences, and which, translated into French, was pub- 

 lished in the April number of that year of Liouville's ' Journal des 

 Mathematiques.' That first paper and others which followed it on 

 the same subject, and his papers on the physical theory of light and 

 on elasticity, are grand and permanently valuable contributions to 

 science. 



The death of Huxley, one of my predecessors in the Presidential 

 Chair of the Royal Society, takes from us a man who can ill be 

 spared. During the fifty years since he sailed from England, as 

 Assistant- Surgeon on board H.M.S. "Rattlesnake," bound for a 

 surveying expedition in the southern seas, he had been a resolute 

 and untiring searcher after truth, and an enthusiastically devoted 

 teacher of what he learned from others and what he discovered by 

 his own work in biological science. His first contribution to science 

 was a short note communicated, while he was still a student in the 

 Charing Cross Hospital, to the ' Medical Times and Gazette/ de- 

 scribing a structure in the root-sheath of hair, which has since borne 

 the name of Huxley's layer. It was followed by papers on the blood 

 corpuscles of the Amphioxus lanceolatus and on the Anatomy and 

 Affinities of the Family of Medusae, for the British Association and 

 the Royal Society ; and several other articles on various biological 

 subjects, all describing some of the work of the leisure left him by 

 his medical duties during his four years' cruise on board the 

 " Rattlesnake," which were sent home by him to England, and 

 published during his absence. It is to be hoped that the long series, 

 thus so well begun, of papers describing skilful and laborious 

 research by which knowledge was increased in every department of 

 biology, will be given to the world in collected form as soon as pos- 

 sible. Even those purely scientific papers contain ample evidence 

 that Huxley's mind did not rest with the mere recording of results 

 discovered by observation and experiment : in them, and in the nine 

 volumes of collected essays which he has left us, we find everywhere 

 traces of acute and profound philosophic thought. When he intro- 



* Quoted in 'Mathematical and Physical Papers' (Sir William Thomson), 

 p. 92, vol. 1. 



