THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE AS ILLUSTRATED 
BY THE DEVELOPMENT OF METEOROLOGY. 
ANNUAL PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 
BY 
Cleveland Abbe. 
[Read before the Society, December 8, 1906.] 
The ultimate goal of scientific research is not the collection 
ot facts furnished by explorations and surveys, not even the 
exact data furnished by the most laborious measurements as 
in astronomy, geodesy, chemistry, and physics. Neither is it 
the framing of a few generalizations and inductions, such as 
the general idea of evolution; nor is it the establishment of 
some isolated fundamental laws, such as the attraction of 
gravitation, the conservation of energy, the mechanical 
equivalent of heat, the atomic weights and their periodic law. 
Research aims to go deeper than all this and show how these 
laws and phenomena result necessarily from a few simple 
premises — not premises in the sense of assumption, but 
axioms that are just as truly the basis of the physical uni- 
verse as Euclid’s axioms are the basis of geometry. These 
premises or axioms, so far as we can at present see, almost 
certainly belong to the realm of what we call mechanics, or 
the laws of force and matter; it may be the mechanics of 
molecules, atoms, and ions, or it may be the mechanics of 
solids, fluids, or gases; that is to say, it may be the mechanics 
of individual molecules or that of masses of molecules. 
Moreover, these questions of mechanics always involve some 
mathematical study — some graphical, numerical, geomet- 
rical, or analytical method; in every case the progress of 
exact science must wait on the progress of pure mathematics. 
5 '-Bui!. Phil. Soe., Wauh., Vol. 15. 
(27) 
