Mr. Spottiswoode, the new President of the British Associa- tion,
delivered the address at the opening of the meeting at Dublin on Wednesday last. His subject was chiefly mathematics, and we have shown elsewhere how very deep he lays the ultimate uncertainty, on the foundations of which the certainties of our mathematical assumptions rest. But running through the whole of his very able address was the effort to show how many of the most singular of the hypotheses of mathematics, — the hypothesis that what are called imaginary quantities, for instance, have a real interpretation and meaning,—have their analogue in literary and artistic life. Thus he instanced the effort of great writers to place themselves in imagination at a com- pletely different centre of time, as one of the cases in which men of literature use imaginary quantities, and use them to good purpose ; and he referred to the use made in mediteval art of grotesque forms, half-vegetable and half-animal, as the artist's way of expressing truth by the use of imaginary art-forms,—which, nevertheless, quite admit of "rational interpretation." The address should be read to be appreciated.
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