16
THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS.
Another event of good omen for the future has been the
preliminary steps that have been taken to establish closer
relations between the learned societies in East Anglia interested
in like studies to our own. The need for united work in all
scientific research and the evils of isolation in study are
increasingly evident, and we heartily welcome this prospect of
union with valued fellow-workers.
I will not venture to attempt a review of the general
progress of science in the branches in which we are chiefly
interested. It is more and more difficult to keep abreast with
progress, even of one branch of knowledge, and yet at the same
time the interdependence of the various branches of study
becomes more and more fascinating, yet bewildering. It is not
only difficult but impossible to define spheres of influence among
the sciences either in their abstract study or in their practical
applications. Perhaps in nothing is this interpenetration more
marked than in the striking manner in which the phenomena of
life, and still more of the interdependence of the higher and lower
forms of life, complicate so many problems of modern scientific
thought. In Chemistry, for example, the marvellous progress
in the synthesis of organic compounds had seemed almost to do
away with any distinction between the organic and the inorganic,
but though these distinctions may seem obliterated as to the
resultant compounds, our results are obtained by processes that
throw little or no light on the natural life problem. We can
synthesize alcohol from olefiant gas, and we can, by oxidation with
spongy platinum, change this into acetic acid. In this we but
clumsily imitate the processes which, under the influence of the
living plant, synthesize starch from the gases of the air ; then,
by the inimitable action of germination, transform it into sugar ;
and then, by the obscure intervention of a foreign micro-organism,
split it up (how we know not as yet) into alcohol and carbonic
acid, ready for yet another organism to transform (for unknown
reasons of its own) into acetic acid.
Again, our conception of organic chemistry has been
revolutionised by the discovery firstly of the influence of the
nitrifying micro-organisms in transforming and modifying the
combined nitrogen of the soil, and still more of the semiparasitic
organisms to which apparently the supply of combined nitrogen
for higher plant life is largely due. It is impossible to over-
estimate the importance of this and of other cases of symbiosis.