158 Anniversary Address by Sir A. Geikie. [Nov. 30, 



The Eoyal Society is still the one great institution in this country which 

 draws its members from the cultivators of every branch of science, and 

 which freely opens its publications to receive their communications of 

 observation and discovery. It should thus be specially htted to bring the 

 workers on the two sides of science, physical and biological, into touch with 

 each other. It has recognised and in various ways endeavoured to discharge 

 its duty in this respect. In its Croonian and Bakerian Lectures it has given 

 to the world many masterly expositions of the progress of research in 

 different branches of enquiry. It has likewise provided, by one of its standing 

 orders, for occasional meetings devoted to the discussion of papers of general 

 interest specially prepared for the purpose. Nevertheless, it may be urged 

 that some more frequent and efiective procedure might still be devised to 

 lessen the evils of isolation and to make the work that is in progress in one 

 section of the scientific domain more comprehensible in the others. It is 

 futile to find fault with the technicalities of a science. These are its symbols 

 and language with which its students cannot dispense. But without 

 trying to provide for all the needs of the " man in the street," it is often 

 possible to give the gist of an observation or a discovery in simple words that 

 will convey a definite conception of what has been observed or discovered. 

 And thus a subject which, when expounded in brief technical phraseology, 

 repels men of another science, may yet be made interesting and suggestive to 

 these same men. 



It may be worthy of consideration whether in those branches of science 

 which, having special societies of their own, are seldom represented by 

 papers at our meetings or in our publications, some of their cultivators might 

 not be invited from time to time to bring before the Society reports of 

 recent advances in their different fields of research. Would it not be 

 practicable, for example, to find among the many distingiiished chemists in 

 our ranks a few who would be willing to present occasionally at our 

 meetings, in language intelligible to a general audience of scientific men, an 

 DuLliue of the latest progress, present condition, and future problems of some 

 section of their great science ? 



But above all there is an aspect of scientific thought, which although 

 fully recognised by the early fathers of the Royal Society, is too apt to be 

 overlooked aniid.st the engrossing pressure of modern research. I allude 

 to the philosophy of science. At intervals in the progress of scientific 

 encjuiry it is desirable to look at tlic subject from the philosophical side, and 

 to seek for a correlation and synthesis of the various processes of nature 

 which discovery has revealed. The mental vision recjuired for this quest 

 is not given to nion; thun a few gifted minds. I'ut we can count among 



