ADDRESS BY SIR NORMAN LOCKYER, K.C.B., LL.D., F.R.S., PRESIDENT. The Influence of Brain-power on History. My first duty to-night is a sad one. I have to refer to a great loss which this nation and this Association have sustained. By the death of the great Englishman and great statesman who has just passed away we members of the British Association are deprived of one of the most illustrious of our Past-Presidents. We have to mourn the loss of an enthusiastic student of science. We recognise that as Prime Minister he was mindful of the interests of science, and that to him we owe a more general recognition on the part of the State of the value to the nation of the work of scientific men. On all these grounds you will join in the expression of respectful sympathy with Lord Salisbury's family in their great personal loss which your Council has embodied this morning in a resolution of condolence. Last year, when this friend of science ceased to be Prime Minister, he was succeeded by another statesman who also has given many proofs of his devotion to philosophical studies, and has shown in many utterances that he has a clear understanding of the real place of science in modern civilisation. We, then, have good grounds for hoping that the improvement in the position of science in this country which we owe to the one will also be the care of his successor, who has honoured the Association by accepting the unanimous nomination of your Council to be your President next year, an acceptance which adds a new lustre to this Chair. On this we may congratulate ourselves all the more because I think, although it is not generally recognised, that the century into which we have now well entered may be more momentous than any which has preceded it, and that the present history of the world is being so largely moulded by the influence of brain-power, which in these modern days has to do with natural as well as human forces and laws, that statesmen and politicians will have in the future to pay more regard to education and science as empire-builders and empire-guarders than they have paid in the past. The nineteenth century will ever be known as the one in which the influences of science were first fully realised in civilised communities; the scientific progress was so gigantic that it seems rash to predict that any of its successors can be more important in the life of any nation. Disraeli, in 1873, referring to the progress up to that year, spoke as follows: How much has happened in these fifty years-a period more remarkable than any, I will venture to say, in the annals of mankind. I am not thinking of the rise and fall of Empires, the change of dynasties, the establishment of Governments. I am thinking of those revolutions of science which have had much more effect than any political causes, which have changed the position and prospects of mankind more than all the conquests and all the codes and all the legislators that ever lived.' 1 The progress of science, indeed, brings in many considerations which are momentous in relation to the life of any limited community-any one nation. One of these considerations to which attention is now being greatly drawn is that a relative decline in national wealth derived from industries must follow a relative neglect of scientific education. It was the late Prince Consort who first emphasised this when he came here fresh from the University of Bonn. Hence the 'Prince Corsort's Committee,' which led to the foundation of the College of Chemistry, and afterwards of the Science and Art Department. From that time to this the warnings of our men of science have become louder and more urgent in each succeeding year. But this is not all; the commercial output of one country in one century as compared with another is not alone in question; the acquirement of the scientific spirit and a knowledge and utilisation of the forces of Nature are very much further reaching in their effects on the progress and decline of nations than is generally imagined. Britain in the middle of the last century was certainly the country which gained most by the advent of science, for she was then in full possession of those material gifts of Nature, coal and iron, the combined winning and utilisation of which, in the production of machinery and in other ways, soon made her the richest country in the world, the seat and throne of invention and manufacture, as Mr. Carnegie has called her. Being the great producers and exporters of all kinds of manufactured goods, we became eventually, with our iron ships, the great carriers, and hence the supremacy of our mercantile marine and our present command of the sea. The most fundamental change wrought by the early applications of science was in relation to producing and carrying power. With the winning of mineral wealth and the production of machinery in other 1 Nature, November 27, 1873, vol. ix. p. 71. countries, and cheap and rapid transit between nations, our superiority as depending upon our first use of vast material resources was reduced. Science, which is above all things cosmopolitan-planetary, not national -internationalises such resources at once. In every market of the world 'things of beauty, things of use, Which one fair planet can produce, Brought from under every star,' were soon to be found. Hence the first great effect of the general progress of science was relatively to diminish the initial supremacy of Britain due to the first use of material resources, which indeed was the real source of our national wealth and place among the nations. The unfortunate thing was that, while the foundations of our superiority depending upon our material resources were being thus sapped by a cause which was beyond our control, our statesmen and our Universities were blind leaders of the blind, and our other asset, our mental resources, which was within our control, was culpably neglected. So little did the bulk of our statesmen know of the part science was playing in the modern world and of the real basis of the nation's activities that they imagined political and fiscal problems to be the only matters of importance. Nor, indeed, are we very much better off to-day. In the important discussions recently raised by Mr. Chamberlain next to nothing has been said of the effect of the progress of science on prices. The whole course of the modern world is attributed to the presence or absence of taxes on certain commodities in certain countries. The fact that the great fall in the price of food-stuffs in England did not come till some thirty or forty years after the removal of the corn duty between 1847 and 1849 gives them no pause; for them new inventions, railways, and steamships are negligible quantities; the vast increase in the world's wealth, in Free Trade and Protected countries alike, comes merely, according to them, in response to some political shibboleth. We now know, from what has occurred in other States, that if our Ministers had been more wise and our Universities more numerous and efficient our mental resources would have been developed by improvements in educational method, by the introduction of science into schools, and, more important than all the rest, by the teaching of science by experiment, observation, and research, and not from books. It is because this was not done that we have fallen behind other nations in properly applying science to industry, so that our applications of science to industry are relatively less important than they were. But this is by no means all; we have lacked the strengthening of the national life produced by fostering the scientific spirit among all classes and along all lines of the nation's activity; many of the responsible authorities know little and care less. about science; we have not learned that it is the duty of a State to organise its forces as carefully for peace as for war; that Universities and other teaching centres are as important as battleships or big battalions; are, in fact, essential parts of a modern State's machinery, and, as such, to be equally aided and as efficiently organised to secure its future wellbeing. Now the objects of the British Association as laid down by its founders seventy-two years ago are 'To give a stronger impulse and a more systematic direction to scientific inquiry-to promote the intercourse of those who cultivate science in different parts of the British Empire with one another and with foreign philosophers-to obtain a more general attention to the objects of science and a removal of any disadvantages of a public kind which impede its progress.' In the main, my predecessors in this Chair, to which you have done me the honour to call me, have dealt, and with great benefit to science, with the objects first named. But at a critical time like the present I find it imperative to depart from the course so generally followed by my predecessors and to deal with the last object named, for unless by some means or other we 'obtain a more general attention to the objects of science and a removal of any disadvantages of a public kind which impede its progress,' we shall suffer in competition with other communities in which science is more generally utilised for the purposes of the national life. The Struggle for Existence in Modern Communities. Some years ago, in discussing the relations of scientific instruction to our industries, Huxley pointed out that we were in presence of a new 'struggle for existence,' a struggle which, once commenced, must go on until only the fittest survives. It is a struggle between organised species-nations-not between individuals or any class of individuals. It is, moreover, a struggle in which science and brains take the place of swords and sinews, on which depended the result of those conflicts which, up to the present, have determined the history and fate of nations. The school, the University, the laboratory, and the workshop are the battlefields of this new warfare. But it is evident that if this, or anything like it, be true, our industries cannot be involved alone; the scientific spirit, brain-power, must not be limited to the workshop, if other nations utilise it in all branches of their administration and executive. It is a question of an important change of front. It is a question of finding a new basis of stability for the Empire in face of new conditions. I am certain that those familiar with the present state of things will acknowledge that the Prince of Wales's call, 'Wake up,' applies quite as much to the members of the Government as it does to the leaders of industry. What is wanted is a complete organisation of the resources of the nation, so as to enable it best to face all the new problems which the progress of science, combined with the ebb and flow of population and other factors in international competition, are ever bringing before us. Every Minister, every public department, is involved; and this being so, it is the duty of the whole nation-King, Lords, and Commons-to do what is necessary to place our scientific institutions on a proper footing in order to enable us to 'face the music,' whatever the future may bring. The idea that science is useful only to our industries comes from want of thought. If anyone is under the impression that Britain is only suffering at present from the want of the scientific spirit among our industrial classes, and that those employed in the State service possess adequate brain-power and grip of the conditions of the modern world into which science so largely enters, let him read the Report of the Royal Commission on the War in South Africa. There he will see how the whole 'system' employed was, in Sir Henry Brackenbury's words applied to a part of it, 'unsuited to the requirements of an army which is maintained to enable us to make war.' Let him read also in the Address of the President of the Society of Chemical Industry what drastic steps had to be taken by Chambers of Commerce and 'a quarter of a million of working-men' to get the Patent Law Amendment Act into proper shape in spite of all the advisers and officials of the Board of Trade. Very few people realise the immense number of scientific problems the solution of which is required for the State service. The nation itself is a gigantic workshop; and the more our rulers and legislators, administrators and executive officers possess the scientific spirit, the more the rule of thumb is replaced in the State service by scientific methods, the more able shall we be, thus armed at`all points, to compete successfully with other countries along all lines of national as well as of commercial activity. It is obvious that the power of a nation for war, in men and arms and ships, is one thing; its power in the peace struggles to which I have referred is another. In the latter the source and standard of national efficiency are entirely changed. To meet war conditions, there must be equality or superiority in battleships and army corps. To meet the new peace conditions, there must be equality or superiority in Universities, scientific organisation, and everything which conduces to greater brainpower. Our Industries are suffering in the present International Competition. The present condition of the nation, so far as its industries are con cerned, is as well known, not only to the Prime Minister, but to other political leaders in and out of the Cabinet, as it is to you and to me. Let me refer to two speeches delivered by Lord Rosebery and Mr. Chamberlain on two successive days in January 1901. Lord Rosebery spoke as follows: ... The war I regard with apprehension is the war of trade which is unmistakably upon us. ... When I look round me I cannot blind my |