The historical student, then, cannot afford to be indifferent to any part of the record of man's political being; but as his abilities for study are limited, he will, while reckoning all history to be within his range, have his own special range within which he will master every detail (Rede Lecture).
Three of these addresses were published, wholly or in part, in the later editions of Village Communities; the substance of others is understood to be embodied in the Cambridge Rede lecture of 1875, which is to be found in the same volume.
In his Rede Lecture on Mind and Motion (1885), he said that Clifford's deduction, that the G..1.
In 1899, at the jubilee commemoration of Sir George Stokes, he was Rede lecturer at Cambridge, his subject being the undulatory theory of light and its influence on modern physics; and on that occasion the honorary degree of D.Sc. was conferred on him by the university.
He even found time for academical work, delivering the Hulsean lectures (1893-1894) and the Rede lecture (1894) at Cambridge, and the Romanes lecture at Oxford (1896).