He was far too deeply absorbed in teaching chemistry to do very much original work, but his papers on camphor, on sulphonic acids, on the nature of solutions, and (in collaboration with his son, E. F. A.,) on enzymes, are worthy of mention.

He was a great teacher, having that “gift which is as a hall mark,” the gift of interesting his hearers, and, consequently, his pupils “not only attained distinction in the academic and industrial worlds, but also retained a lively interest in chemistry, an affection for their professor, and an outlook upon life that was widened and intensified by his stimulating personality.”

Professor Sir David Orme Masson was the “acknowledged and distinguished leader of the chemical profession in Australia.”

He founded the Australian Chemical Institute, and when, in 1932, that body was incorporated by Royal Charter, he became its first President.

The son of a professor of English literature in the University of Edinburgh, he had already distinguished himself by his work in organic chemistry, when, at the age of twenty-eight, he was appointed to the newly-created chair of chemistry in the University of Melbourne, where he and his eminent colleagues, Baldwin Spencer and T. B. Lyle, soon raised the University to a position of distinction in the field of scientific teaching.

His original papers, at first confined to purely organic chemistry, later became of a definitely physico-chemical nature, and show, not only a facility in mathematical treatment, but also a characteristic clarity of expression.

For thirty-seven years—more than a generation—his lectures on chemistry were considered models of simplicity and style.

His record was one of great achievement, and he has left many “treasured memories in the minds of those who knew him and owed so much to him.”

The death of Baron Rutherford of Nelson was felt throughout the whole world, for his achievements had proved him the most brilliant experimenter of our time, and had assured him “a prominent and illustrious place in the annals of science.”

In rapid succession an 1851 Exhibition Scholar from Canterbury College in the University of New Zealand, professor of physics at McGill University, Montreal, professor of physics at Manchester University, and Cavendish professor of physics at Cambridge University—where he proved himself a worthy successor to such men of genius as Maxwell, Rayleigh, and Thomson—he startled the scientific world by his work on radioactivity, by his revolutionary ideas on the constitution of the atom, and by his marvellous experiments on the transmutation of elements—experiments “which gave him, perhaps, his greatest renown.”

“In his scientific work he was scrupulously honest; he did not delude himself or the world of science by unreliable experiments or deductions.” He wrote and spoke with the charm of simplicity. “He

was devoted to his work, because he was enthusiastic in the cause of science, not because he thought of his own advancement,” and for that reason he was always a great colleague, ready to give others their due credit, and careful that all who helped him should receive full recognition.

Speaking of him, Sir William Bragg, President of The Royal Society of London, said: “His noble contributions to knowledge have been the inspiration of innumerable workers and the foundation of a vast series of researches.”

All who knew him hoped that his inspiration might be available for many a year to come (he was only sixty-six years old), but that was not to be, and “the world is left deeply poorer.”

In Rutherford a great man passed, and for obvious greatness there is no substitute.

By the death of Edward Meyrick, entomological science has lost one of its most assiduous and capable independent workers.

Mr Meyrick was generally recognised as an authority on the Micro-Lepidoptera of the world, and had amassed one of the largest collections in existence. From 1877 to 1886 he was a schoolmaster at Sydney and at Christchurch, and later an assistant master at Marlborough College, England. During his sojourn in New Zealand he collected our native Lepidoptera with great vigour, visiting Mount Arthur, Arthur's Pass, Lake Wakatipu, and many other localities then very much less accessible than now. He has contributed to our Transactions every year from 1882 until 1937, and his published papers have been of inestimable value to our local entomologists. Although necessarily carrying on a most extensive and exacting correspondence, Mr Meyrick always found time to answer every inquiry in the fullest possible manner, and with great promptitude.

Of the many activities of Bishop Herbert W. Williams, whose sudden death in December last we all so sincerely regretted, a whole volume might well be written.

He was President of our Society in 1935 and 1936, and, at the time of his death, our esteemed Vice-President.

A devout and active churchman, a keen and wisely cautious ethnologist, a charming man of the world, and, above all perhaps, a loving, trusted friend of the Maori people, his loss was deeply felt by all sections of the community.

He has his reward, for of him we may surely use the words of Belloe:—

“He does not die who can bequeath
Some influence to the land he knows.”

Professor Sir Algernon P. W. Thomas, one of the four foundation professors of Auckland University College, was for over fifty years an active member of the Auckland Institute and Museum, and for some time a member of the Board of Governors of the New Zealand Institute (now the Royal Society of New Zealand). He was actually the first to contribute to our endowment fund.

A scientist of very wide interests—mathematician, biologist, geologist—he did an enormous amount of work in the cause of education from the primary grade to that of the University, work which was fittingly recognised by his elevation to a knighthood not long before his death.

The Auckland district in particular has good cause to hold him in grateful memory.

On behalf of the Council I congratulate Dr F. J. Turner upon his election to a “Sterling Fellowship” at Yale University, feeling confident that by his work abroad he will add to the reputation he has already gained.

The acceptance of a fellowship necessitates, however, his resignation from the position of Hon. Editor, a position which he has filled so ably during the past three years.

I feel sure that every member of the Council will agree with me when I say that the Society's Transactions have benefited greatly by his labour of love.

I also congratulate our co-opted member, Dr. P. Marshall, upon his election as one of the foreign correspondents of the “Académie des Sciences,” of Paris.

This distinguished body may be said to date from 1666, and, in spite of suppressions and re-establishments, has had so many great men among its members that “to trace the fortunes of this Academy would be to write the history of the rise and progress of science in France.”

I now wish to refer briefly to some remarks made by your last President, the late Bishop Williams, in his presidential address in May, 1936.

You will remember that he suggested it might be advisable to provide rules for the election of various committees, and some of you may have wondered why no action had been taken in the matter.

The reason is that Bishop Williams himself was not quite certain about it (he made no further reference to it either in his next address or at meetings of the Standing Committee) and in our last talk together he told me that he had concluded it was probably best to leave well alone. He now felt that it might, at times, be impossible to follow the letter of a rule demanding definite conditions for membership of a particular committee, and rules which had to be broken might well be worse than none.

I said I also saw difficulties in connection with this particular proposal, and considered the constitution of the Award and Fellowship Committees already sufficiently safeguarded.

We therefore decided that for the present it was wise to proceed no further.

His other suggestion, that the election of an Hon. Treasurer should be made obligatory, was not referred to.

I hope that these few remarks make the position clear.

I turn now to the general position of the Society, or rather, to the aims of the Society, for while its position depends entirely upon the vigour and honesty with which it pursues its aims, those aims can be fairly definitely stated.

I therefore raise the question whether the time has not now arrived for the Society to alter the original statement of its objects—a statement no doubt eminently suited to its day—and follow more closely in the steps of other bodies bearing the honourable title “Royal Society,” especially the oldest and most illustrious, viz.—The Royal Society of London, by restricting itself to the sciences?

Whether we care to acknowledge it or not we are already, in reality, a society for the furthering of scientific knowledge, and, whether we like it or not, we do not receive, and will not receive, for insertion in our Transactions those literary and artistic papers which, so it seems to me, find a much more natural resting place in publications almost entirely devoted to literature and art respectively.

It is useless to deny the revolution which has taken place during the last few decades. Science itself has so rapidly extended its bounds that a division of its vast territory into smaller units was inevitable, as was also the tendency for those of literary or artistic bent to follow paths of their own making.

We may regret these effects of revolution—no revolution has ever been satisfactory to all parties—but no regrets can bring back the past, and what the present demands is work.

Upon its work, and upon that alone, rests the future position of the Society, and its strength in work depends neither on its Council nor on its Fellows, but upon the strength of its various branches, and the strength of any such branch depends upon the honest endeavours of its individual members.

If every member of each branch does, to the best of his ability, his share of the needed work, the Society as a whole will never have cause to feel its position other than secure.

I have said that the Society's main object is the advancement of scientific knowledge. All such advance depends upon work, although it is now the fashion to use the word research.

Not long ago a speaker at any scientific meeting found it a “popular and an easy thing to attack the Government for its almost entire neglect of scientific research.” The Great War, however, brought about a complete change, and scientific research is now being encouraged in almost every direction. In New Zealand our Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, with its increasing family of quasi-industrial laboratories, is an instance of this happy change,

and the present Government is to be congratulated upon the gradual unfolding of a more generous policy towards the D.S.I.R. and its requests for funds.

I feel sure that any sum thus expended upon genuine scientific research, especially research connected with the industrial problems of the Dominion, will be fully repaid. Indeed, I would go further and say that in these eventful days when material actually fights against material—the synthetic against the natural, and the newer synthetic against its older rival—properly co-ordinated scientific research is our safest form of insurance against economic disaster, and that the Government which refuses to pay the necessary premiums is as foolish as the individual who scorns to insure his wooden house against the risk of fire.

The premiums demanded may at times appear large, but in comparison with the bonuses subsequently declared they are generally very small.

This last statement may seem exaggerated, for I know that in certain quarters it is fashionable to sneer at research departments as (a) costing a lot, and (b) never returning a dividend, and for that reason I should like to give you just one instance, chosen from many, of the way in which industrial research repays its cost.

England, as you know, is poorly supplied with effective sources of water-power, but is richly endowed with available coal of high rank.

Electricity is now being used more and more as a vehicle for transmitting power to a distance, and hence the conversion of the heat energy of coal into electrical energy has become to England a matter of vital importance.

The practical efficiency of the conversion is, moreover, capable of exact measurement.

A few years ago it required an average of 3.71b of coal to produce one unit of electricity. The last report of the Electricity Commissioners shows that an average of only 1.48lb of coal is now required to produce each unit of electricity.

This increase in efficiency—an increase largely attributed to the work of the Electrical Industries Research Association during the past two years—represents an economy of approximately 17,000,000 tons of coal per year, and if the coal is delivered to the various power houses at an average cost of 7s 6d per ton, the annual saving amounts to £6,375,000; actually the saving in 1936–37 was over £7,000,000.

It is not easy to estimate, except very roughly, how much money was spent in directly bringing about this result, as the production of electricity by the use of coal was one only of the many problems studied, but the total amount spent by the British Department of Scientific and Industrial Research during the year mentioned (October 1, 1936, to September 30, 1937) was under £600,000—the official figure being £583,230.

It thus appears that, even if no further advance is made, either in total production or in conversion-efficiency, the whole of the money spent by the department on all its researches was repaid (and will continue to be repaid) more than ten and a-half times a year by this single result. In these days of low interest the dividend is not a bad one, and we need not ask why Nature, in an editorial, remarks: “It is doubtful whether any other expenditure in the national budget brings in anything like the same return as the £600,000 expended by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.”

What thus happened in England has happened in other countries also, and will happen in New Zealand if those to whom our industrial problems are entrusted are given the needed equipment and the necessary time.

The critics who cry out at the expense connected with research, also complain of the time needed by research to reach fruition, and for the lag between discovery and application are apt to blame the scientist. They would be better employed in trying to alter Nature's law that between action and reaction there must be a lag.

It is true that this lag between scientific discovery and economic application shows a tendency to become less than it used to be, but it will always be there, and should be allowed for.

May I, in fairness to our New Zealand workers, stress the fact that in a country like our own, depending chiefly, as it does at present, upon agricultural and pastoral research, the time lag is almost certain to be greater than in a country such as England, where the mechanical industries are of paramount importance. The routine of a field differs widely from that of a factory, and cannot be changed in a day.

The story of the past fifty or sixty years shows clearly that those who seek benefits at the hands of science must be prepared not only to work, but also to wait; it shows, with equal clearness, that waiting brings its reward.

In judging the results of a research institution it must, moreover, never be forgotten that much of the less spectacular work, such as the systematic collection of information, the careful testing of materials, and the establishment of standards, is certainly of no less importance than work leading to developments which catch the public eye. Indeed, “without the foundation of knowledge thus accumulated,” it is more than doubtful whether the important advances already made by research institutions would have been possible.

These advances have, indeed, been made in such rapid succession, and have had such far-reaching results, that there are those who would now apply a brake.

It would, of course, be useless to attempt to bar further progress, for the attempt could only end in failure, but it might be both

possible and wise to use foresight and caution in releasing to industry any discovery which seemed likely to cause immediate hardship, whether by rendering obsolete some expensive and hitherto effective plant, or by writing off, as it were in a day, the whole value attaching to accumulated stocks.

In future, perhaps, some department as yet unborn may be able to perform this difficult, if not invidious, task.

But I must return to the present.

May I sum up this section of my address by saying that to me it is evident that, in spite of the criticisms to which they are subjected, criticisms sometimes (as we have lately heard) expressed in contemptuous but very silly words, our New Zealand research institutions, both those established by the Government and those under private control, are doing good work, and are honestly endeavouring “to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.”

The subject of research, whether undertaken by independent workers or by teams of a departmental laboratory, leads directly to that of publication, for surely, to use Swedenborg's quaint words, “whatever is worthy to be known should by all means be brought into the great and general market of the world.”

In the matter of publishing the results of research the Royal Society of New Zealand has done its share right well. Its Transactions, now about to enter on their sixty-eighth volume, constitute a worthy record of work in pure and applied science, and, in conjunction with the publications of other scientific and technical institutions of the Dominion, render valuable service to the community, and do much towards providing material without which some of our industries could hardly flourish; “industry keeps up-to-date or goes into liquidation.”

Now and then one hears the question: What does the Royal Society do with its annual grant? The answer is a very simple one, namely: Gives it to the printers.

Our duly audited accounts show that since the year 1918 the Society has received in grants from the Governments of the time a total sum of £18,850, and that during the same period the sums spent in actual publication of its Transactions and Bulletins totalled £16,935. No less than 89.8 per centum of the grants received was thus used in publishing the results of original work.

The accounts further show that in five of the nineteen years included in the above statement the Society spent on printing an amount considerably greater than the grant received, and who shall say that the expenditure was not justified?

Were it not for the levy imposed upon individual members of the Society's branches the work of publication could not be carried on so effectively as it now is. The Society has undoubtedly been severely handicapped during the past few years by the shortness of