494: 



THE POPULAR SCIEXCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



which, through your suffrages, I have been so 

 long and so agreeably connected ; and, secondly, 

 to indulge in a few reflections, not indeed upon 

 the details or technical progress, but upon the 

 external aspects and tendencies of the science 

 which on this occasion I have the honor to rep- 

 resent. The former of these subjects is, perhaps, 

 trite, but as an old man is allowed to become gar- 

 rulous on his own hobby, so an old officer may be 

 pardoned for lingering about a favorite theme. 

 And although the latter may appear somewhat 

 unpromising, I have decided to make it one of the 

 topics of my discourse, from the consideration 

 that the holder of this office will generally do 

 better by giving utterance to what has already 

 become part of his own thought than by gather- 

 ing matter outside of its habitual range for the 

 special occasion. For, as it seems to me, the in- 

 terest (if any) of an address consists not so much 

 in the multitude of things therein brought for- 

 ward as in the individuality of the mode in which 

 they are treated. 



The British Association has already entered 

 its fifth decade. It has held its meetings, this 

 the forty-eighth, in twenty-eight different towns. 

 In six cities of note — viz., York, Bristol, New- 

 castle-on-Tyne, Plymouth, Manchester, and Bel- 

 fast — its curve of progress may be said to have 

 a node, or point through which it has twice 

 passed ; in the five universities of Oxford, Cam- 

 bridge, Dublin, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, and in 

 the two great commercial centres, Liverpool and 

 Birmingham, it may similarly be said to have a 

 triple point, or one through which it has three 

 times passed. Of our forty-six presidents, more 

 than half (twenty-six in fact) have passed away ; 

 while the remainder hold important posts in sci- 

 ence and in the public service, or in other avoca- 

 tions not less honorable in themselves nor less 

 useful to the commonwealth. And whether it be 

 due to the salubrity of the climate or to the calm 

 and dispassionate spirit in which science is pur- 

 sued by its votaries here, I do not pretend to 

 say ; but it is a fact that the earliest of our ex- 

 presidents still living, himself one of the original 

 members of the Association, is a native of and 

 resident in this country. 



At both of our former meetings held in Dub- 

 lin, in 1835 and 1857 respectively, while greatly 

 indebted to the liberal hospitality of the citizens 

 at large, we were, as we now are, under especial 

 obligations to the authorities of Trinity College 

 for placing at our disposal buildings, not only 

 unusually spacious and convenient in themselves, 

 but full of reminiscences calculated to awake the 



scientific sympathies of all who may be gathered 

 in them. At both of those former Dublin meet- 

 ings the venerable name of Lloyd figured at our 

 head ; and, if long-established custom had not 

 seemed to preclude it, I could on many accounts 

 have wished that we had met for a third time 

 under the same name. And although other dis- 

 tinguished men, such as Dr. Robinson, Profs. 

 Stokes, Tyndall, and Andrews, are similarly dis- 

 qualified by having already passed the presiden- 

 tial chair, while others again, such as Sir W. R. 

 Hamilton, Dr. McCullagh, and Prof. Jukes, are 

 permanently lost to our ranks, still we should 

 not have had far to seek had we looked for a 

 president in this fertile island itself. But as 

 every one connected with the place of meeting 

 partakes of the character of host toward our- 

 selves as guests, it has been thought by our old- 

 est and most experienced members that we 

 should better respond to an invitation by bring- 

 ing with us a president to speak as our repre- 

 sentative than by seeking one on the spot ; and 

 we may always hope on subsequent occasions 

 that some of our present hosts may respond to a 

 similar call. 



But, leaving our past history, which will 

 form a theme more appropriate to our jubilee 

 meeting in 18S1 at the ancient city of York, I 

 will ask your attention to a few particulars of 

 our actual operations. 



Time was when the Royal Societies of London 

 and Edinburgh and the Royal Irish Academy 

 were the only representative bodies of British 

 science and the only receptacles of memoirs re- 

 lating thereto. But latterly the division of labor, 

 so general in industrial life, has operated in giv- 

 ing rise to special societies, such as the Astro- 

 nomical, the Linncean, the Chemical, the Geologi- 

 cal, the Geographical, the Statistical, the Mathe- 

 matical, the Physical, and many others. To 

 both the earlier or more general and the later or 

 more special societies alike, the British Associa- 

 tion shows resemblance and affinity. We are 

 general in our comprehensiveness ; we are spe- 

 cial in our sectional arrangement; and in this 

 respect we offer not only a counterpart, but to 

 some extent a counterpoise, to the general ten- 

 dency to subdivision in science. Further still, 

 while maintaining in their integrity all the ele- 

 ments of a strictly scientific body, we also in- 

 clude, in our character of a microcosm, and 

 under our more social aspect, a certain freedom 

 of treatment and interaction of our various 

 branches which is scarcely possible among sep- 

 arate and independent societies. 



