Summaries of Addresses of Presidents of Sections^*

Abstract

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH IN PHYSICS. SIR J. J. THOMSON devoted his presidential address to Section A (Mathematical and Physical Sciences) to a discussion of “The Growth in Opportunities for Education and Research in Physics during the Past Fifty Years”. The limit of fifty years was inevitable, for organised facilities for teaching and research in physics were almost unknown until towards the end of the nineteenth century. Much of the physical work of Joule, Stokes, Spottiswoode, Huggins, de la Rue, Rayleigh, and E. H. Griffiths was done in private rooms or private laboratories. Instruction was also unorganised. These men, like Kelvin and Maxwell, were in regard to physics largely self-taught, but they had learned to use their hands. In the early ‘seventies there were only six physical laboratories in England; now there are considerably more than three hundred.