average, though some 600 fewer than at the meeting in the same city twenty-five years ago, when Sir John Lubbock presided and the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the association was celebrated. The president this year was Dr. E. Ray Lankester, director of the British Museum of Natural History. His address consisted of two parts—one a survey of the progress of science during the preceding twenty-five years; the second a discussion of the relations of the government to science. It is an almost impossible task for one man to describe the extraordinary and diverse scientific advances of the past generation. Although the address as printed is very long, numerous important topics are of necessity omitted, and others are perhaps unduly emphasized. It is not certain that Metchnikoff's phagocytic theory of immunity occupies the important place in modern science that is given to it in this address, nor even that radium twenty-five years hence will loom as large as it does now. In his review of the influence of science on the life of the community and its relation to the government, Professor Lankester takes the somewhat pessimistic attitude which appears to be common in Great Britain. He says that political administrators are altogether unaware of the vital importance of science in public affairs and that whole departments of the government in which scientific knowledge is the one thing needful are carried on by ministers and clerks who are ignorant of science and dislike it. Dr. Lankester attributes this ignorance and dislike to "the defective education, both at school and university, of our governing class, as well as to a racial dislike among all classes to the establishment and support by public funds of posts which the average man may not expect to succeed by popular clamor or class privilege in gaining for himself—posts which must be held by men of special training and mental gifts."
Dr. Lankester then enumerates on the other side of the account the establishment of the National Physical Laboratory, the subsidizing of the Marine Biological Association and the endowment of the Lister Institute by Lord Iveagh. He continues: "Many other noble gifts to scientific research have been made in this country during the period on which w r e are looking back. Let us be thankful for them, and admire the wise munificence of the donors. But none the less we must refuse to rely entirely on such liberality for the development of the army of science, which has to do battle for mankind against the obvious disabilities and sufferings which afflict us and can be removed by knowledge. The organization and finance of this army should be the care of the state."
The British Association will meet next year at Leicester under the presidency of Sir David Gill, astronomer royal in South Africa. The meeting of 1908 will be in Dublin, and in 1909 the association will for the third time visit Canada, meeting in Winnipeg.
SCIENTIFIC ITEMS
Dr. Ludwig Boltzmann, eminent for his work in theoretical physics, of which subject he was professor in the University of Vienna, has committed suicide.
Professor S. F. Earle has resigned the directorship of the Cuban Central Agricultural Station, which was organized in 1902.—Dr. H. C. Wood, for thirty years professor of therapeutics in the University of Pennsylvania and until 1902 clinical professor of diseases of the nervous system, has retired from the active duties of his chair, and has been made professor emeritus. —Dr. A. R. Crook, for the past twelve years professor of mineralogy and economic geology at Northwestern University, has been appointed curator of the Illinois State Museum of Natural History at Springfield.
