Lord Salisbury, as Chancellor of Oxford University, is the chosen
President of the British Association this year at its Oxford meeting, and we must say that he showed himself on Wednesday much better able to interpret scientific ideas to the ordinary public than most of the great scientific experts. His address was far the most brilliant that the Association has heard for many years back. He discoursed on the vast extent of our ignorance rather than of our knowledge, and described that knowledge as being little more than a number of spots of light, discontinuous and often scattered very widely over the immeasurable darkness that surrounds us. Of the origin of the sixty-five chemical elements we know nothing. The earth is chiefly constituted of about one-third of the number,—two of which, and those found here in very large quantities, if we count the atmosphere of the earth as belonging to it, namely, oxygen and nitrogen, appear not to be present in the sun ;—" another third are useful but some- what rare ; the remaining third are curiosities." If the earth is a fragment thrown off by the sun, how is it that it contains such large quantities of substances of which the sun shows no trace P It is of no use "to mutter the comfortable word evolution," for the elementary sub- stances do not breed, and they cannot therefore be accounted for by heredity acting under the influence of natural selection.
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