MUSIC AND SCIENCE. 
BY 
Charles Kasson Wead. 
(Address of tlie retiring President, delivered before the Society, 
Saturday evening, January 15, 1910.) 
We meet tonight under unusual conditions. About a year 
ago the Society elected as President its most distinguished 
member, Simon Newcomb; after a long and painful illness 
he died July 11. In December } on the day fixed in the by- 
laws for the annual address of the President, we listened to 
tributes of esteem and to able addresses commemorating his 
life and services. To attempt to add anything tonight to 
what has been so appreciatively said by men who knew him 
and his work so well would be superfluous and inappropriate. 
To the office left vacant I was elected for the remainder of 
the year; and members of the Society, jealous of its traditions, 
insisted that one who had held the honor, if only for a short 
time, should fulfill, at the earliest practicable date, the duty 
of presenting a Presidential address. 
The subject I have chosen belongs in part to one branch of 
Physics: while this branch receives the smallest number of 
pages in a text-book, has the fewest votaries, and lies at one 
side of the modern current of spectacular or industrial re- 
search, there is, on the other hand, no branch of physical 
science which deals with subject-matter lying so close to the 
heart of humanity as Acoustics. In studying electricity or 
thermodynamics, who ever thinks of man’s desires and 
actions as part of the material to be investigated? But 
Acoustics belongs to the humanities as well as to mathematics 
23 — Bull. Phil. Soc., Wash., Vol. 15. (169) 
