8 
ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 
of nature, ready again for the use of man. Shakespeare was a true 
seer when he put into the mouth of Ariel the ditty which, while it 
recalled to Prince Ferdinand the memory of a drowned father, also 
led the Prince to reflect, with an amount of truth unheeded by 
Prospero, “ this is no mortal business, nor no sound that the earth 
owes.” Ariel sings:— 
“ Full fathom five thy father lies ; 
Of his hones are coral made ; 
Those are pearls that were his eyes ; 
Nothing of him that doth fade 
But doth suffer a sea-change 
Into something rich and strange.” 
That which the hard apparently foresaw, some three centuries ago, 
the modern student has proved. In their patient search for truth 
a few earnest men, chiefly during the past hundred years, have 
thread by thread removed the veil that from time immemorial has 
hidden the law of the indestructibility of matter from our eyes. 
"Who decreed that law ? Not man. 
Of the Laws of God in Nature, quite as striking a law as that 
just alluded to is the law of the indestructibility of force : perhaps, 
indeed, more striking because of the pre-eminently striking cha¬ 
racter of force itself. For power, energy, or force, seems to belong, 
if possible, to a higher order of creation than matter—matter being 
limited in its area and having place assigned to it, while force is 
all-pervading ; force ever filling and ever traversing the inter¬ 
stellar spaces as well as ever governing the matter which forms the 
moons, planets, and suns of the universe. Py force is meant that 
which causes motion, that which actuates matter: whether the 
force be manifested by the muscle of an animal, the power of an 
engine, the stroke of the lightning; by the silent attraction of the 
magnet or the warmth of the sun; by the quiet but irresistible 
chemical power which converts one form of matter into another; 
or by light, to which alike the glorious rainbow and the modest 
violet owe their lovely hues. Force, like matter, is indestructible, 
by any means known to us or of which we can conceive. 
To realise the indestructibility of force let us follow in imagina¬ 
tion the associated forces of heat and light as they, possibly with 
other forces, impinge on the leaves of trees in summer. The forces 
are absorbed, the leaves and the woody tissue with which the 
leaves are linked undergoing a consequent change in chemical 
character: in common language the leaves and wood grow; the 
change and the growth being so dependent on the light and heat 
that neither change nor growth would take place in the absence of 
light and heat, even though the air and soil supplied the materials 
for growth as usual. Time passes and we put the logs of those 
