INAUGURAL PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

TO THE

MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SECTION

OF THE

BRITISH ASSOCIATION AT EXETER,

August, 1869.

101

INAUGURAL PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS,

&c. &c.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,

A few days ago I noticed in a shop window the photograph of a Royal mother and child, which seemed to me a very beautiful group; on scanning it more closely, I discovered that the faces were ordinary, or, at all events, not much above the average, and that the charm arose entirely from the natural action and expression of the mother stooping over and kissing her child which she held in her lap; and I remarked to myself that the homeliest features would become beautiful when lit up by the rays of the soul-like the sun 'gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.' By analogy, the thought struck me that if a man would speak naturally and as he felt on any subject of his predilection, he might hope to awaken a sympathetic interest in the minds of his hearers; and, in corroboration of this I remembered witnessing how the writer of a well-known article in the Quarterly Review' so magnetised his audience at the Royal Institution by his evident enthusiasm that, when the lecture was over and the applause had subsided, some ladies came up to me and implored me to tell them what they should do to get up the Talmud; for that was what the lecture had been about.

Now, as I believe that even Mathematics are not much more repugnant than the Talmud to the common apprehension of mankind, and I really love my subject, I shall not quite despair of rousing and retaining your attention for a short time if I proceed to read (as, for greater assurance against breaking down, I shall beg your permission to do) from the pages I hold in my hand.

It is not without a feeling of surprise and trepidation at my own temerity that I find myself in the position of one about to address this numerous and distinguished assembly. When informed that the Council of the British Association had it in contemplation to recommend me to the General Committee to fill the office of President to the Mathematical and Physical Section, the intimation was accompanied with the tranquillizing assurance that it would rest with myself to deliver or withhold an address as I might think fit, and that I should be only following in the footsteps of many of the most distinguished of my predecessors were I to resolve on the latter course.

Until the last few days I had made up my mind to avail myself of this option, by proceeding at once to the business before us without troubling you to listen to any address, swayed thereto partly by a consciousness of the very limited extent of my oratorical powers, partly by a disinclination, in the midst of various pressing private and official occupations, to undertake a kind of work new to one more used to thinking than to speaking (to making mathematics than to talking about them), and partly and more especially by a feeling of my inadequacy to satisfy the expectations that would

be raised in the minds of those who had enjoyed. the privilege of hearing or reading the allocution (which fills me with admiration and dismay) of my gifted predecessor, Dr. Tyndall, a man in whom eloquence and philosophy seem to be inborn, whom Science and Poetry woo with an equal spell, and whose ideas have a faculty of arranging themselves in forms of order and beauty as spontaneously and unfailingly as those crystalline solutions from which, in a striking passage of his address, he drew so vivid and instructive an illustration.

From this lotos-eater's dream of fancied security and repose I was rudely awakened by receiving from the editor of an old-established journal in this city, a note containing a polite but peremptory request that I should, at my earliest convenience, favour him with a 'copy of the address I proposed to deliver at the forthcoming meeting.' To this invitation, my first impulse was to respond very much in the same way as did the Needy knife-grinder' of the 'Antijacobin,' when summoned to recount the story of his wrongs to his republican sympathiser-Story, God bless you, I have none to tell, Sir!' 'Address, Mr. Editor, I

have none to deliver.'

I have found, however, that increase of appetite still grows with what it feeds on, that those who were present at the opening of the Section last year, and enjoyed my friend Dr. Tyndall's melodious utterances, would consider themselves somewhat ill-treated if they were sent away quite empty on the present occasion, and that, failing an address, the members would feel very much like the guests at a wedding-breakfast