[Footnote 1: Presidential address before the British Association,
Cardiff, 1891.]
By Dr. WILLIAM HUGGINS.
The opening meeting of the British Association was held in Park Hall,
Cardiff, August 18, where a large and brilliant audience assembled,
including, in his richly trimmed official robes, the Marquis of Bute,
who this year holds office as mayor of Cardiff. At the commencement of
the proceedings Sir Frederick Abel took the chair, but this was only
_pro forma_, and in order that he might, after a few complimentary
sentences, resign it to the president-elect, Professor Huggins, the
eminent astronomer, who at once, amid applause, assumed the presidency
and proceeded to deliver the opening address.
Dr. Huggins said that the very remarkable discoveries in our knowledge
of the heavens which had taken place during the past thirty years--a
period of amazing and ever-increasing activity in all branches of
science--had not passed unnoticed in the addresses of successive
presidents; still, it seemed to him fitting that he should speak of
those newer methods of astronomical research which had led to those
discoveries, and which had become possible by the introduction into
the observatory, since 1860, of the spectroscope and the modern
photographic plate. Spectroscopic astronomy had become a distinct and
acknowledged branch of the science, possessing a large literature of
its own, and observatories specially devoted to it. The more recent
discovery of the gelatine dry plate had given a further great impetus
to this modern side of astronomy, and had opened a pathway into the
unknown of which even an enthusiast thirty years ago would scarcely
have dared to dream.