784] 
429 
784. 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS TO THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 
SEPTEMBER 1883. 
[From the Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, (1883), 
pp. 3—37.] 
Since our last meeting we have been deprived of three of our most distinguished 
members. The loss by the death of Professor Henry John Stephen Smith is a very 
grievous one to those who knew and admired and loved him, to his University, and 
to mathematical science, which he cultivated with such ardour and success. I need 
hardly recall that the branch of mathematics to which he had specially devoted himself 
was that most interesting and difficult one, the Theory of Numbers. The immense range 
of this subject, connected with and ramifying into so many others, is nowhere so well 
seen as in the series of reports on the progress thereof, brought up unfortunately 
only to the year 1865, contributed by him to the Reports of the Association; but 
it will still better appear when to these are united (as will be done in the collected 
works in course of publication by the Clarendon Press) his other mathematical writings, 
many of them containing his own further developments of theories referred to in the 
reports. There have been recently or are being published many such collected 
editions—Abel, Cauchy, Clifford, Gauss, Green, Jacobi, Lagrange, Maxwell, Riemann, 
Steiner. Among these the works of Henry Smith will occupy a worthy position. 
More recently, General Sir Edward Sabine, K.C.B., for twenty-one years general 
secretary of the Association, and a trustee, President of the meeting at Belfast in 
the year 1852, and for many years treasurer and afterwards President of the Royal 
Society, has been taken from us, at an age exceeding the ordinary age of man. Born 
October 1788, he entered the Royal Artillery in 1803, and commanded batteries at the 
siege of Fort Erie in 1814 ; made magnetic and other observations in Ross and 
Parry’s North Polar exploration in 1818-19, and in a series of other voyages. He