Wales' Speech

The president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a pale, cheerful, young man, stood upon the platform of the august Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford last week and remarked: "The state of fishing has, I believe, been said to exist when there is a fool at one end of a string and a worm at the other. . . ." The president, elected to preside over the 95th annual meeting of this hoary and distinguished assemblage, had chosen to quip facetiously and without precedent. The president's audience, numbering some 1,500 distinguished scientists, twittered and tittered with ap- preciation--for the president was Edward of Wales. His speech, though about nothing* in particular, was so much more amusing than that delivered in 1859 by the last royal president of the B. A. A. S. --"Dear Albert,"/- Prince Consort of Queen Victoria! After all, mused many a scientist, is not Edward, spontaneous sponsor of such vivid fashions as green leather coats, more admirable than his ramrod-backed great-grandpapa, creator of that appalling garment, the "Prince Albert?" Prince Consort Albert, needless to relate, deserved well of Science by his indefatigable championship of the Great Exposition of 1851 against the opposition of both the Lords and Commons, and his employment of its surplus profit of -L-150,000 to found the present Victoria and Albert Museum, in London. Throughout his life he exhibited a passion for developing British industry which vented itself even upon such details as persuading individual crockery makers to improve the design of their slop-jars. The meeting progressed to a climax in which Lord Balfour thanked Edward of Wales for presiding. Pompously the session adjourned into a procession through the city. Behind, at the old Sheldonian, a leering-visaged ghost lurked, perhaps, the ghost of Benjamin Disraeli, near-supplanter of "Dear Albert" in Victoria's affections. Three years after Albert's death (1861), the Great Jew delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre, a pre-"Fundamentalist" speech* on evolution, so scintillant and persuasive that parts of it will still bear quoting: "What is the question now placed before society with a glib assurance which to me is most astonishing? That question is that: Is man an ape or an angel? I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new-fangled theories."

*It stressed felicitously the concord of Science and Government. /- Francis Charles Augustus Albert Emmanuel of Saxe-Coburg und Gotha. *This speech marked a turning point in the victorious struggle of Disraeli against Gladstone for the export of Church-of- Englanders.