BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 29 



consequence of excessive mental labour long continued, than the 

 freshening excitement of an interchange of ideas with men to whom 

 the same course of researcli had long been an object of interest ? 

 What more likely to extinguish any petty jealousy which might arise 

 and scientific men, like other men, have their weaknesses some- 

 times—than to bring all the parties together in friendly intercourse, 

 where they cannot but feel they have a common object, and are work- 

 ing in a common cause — the discovery of truth ? 



" Again : should the mind, pursuing in retirement some single 

 scientific object, raise up to itself notions exaggerated and unreal, of the 

 importance of that object, and then, elated and misled by some trifling 

 success, should it throw off the garb of humility, the characteristic of 

 science pursued in a proper spirit, what more calculated to dispel 

 the illusion than these meetings, where the man, however eminent 

 in that branch of science to which he may have devoted his almost 

 exclusive attention, will be sure to find others immensely his superior 

 in every other department of human knowledge ? And it is not 

 merely for the sake of individuals engaged in the pursuit of science 

 that these consequences are so valuable ; it is also for the sake of 

 science itself. 



" I will not detain you by enlarging upon the other obvious bene- 

 ficial consequences of these meetings, such as the opportunities they 

 afford for the free discussion of questions upon which the concen- 

 trated knowledge of individuals may be brought to bear with so much 

 success — the opportunities they afford for the formation of new friend- 

 ships between scientific men, often fraught with consequences very 

 important to science, and the necessary tendency of them to encourage 

 a taste for science. Upon all these I will abstain from offering any 

 observations. There is, however, one consequence of these meetings, 

 to which, if you will permit me to detain you a moment longer, I will 

 just advert. 



"It has been remaiked by a modem traveller of considerable depth 

 of observation, that he had always found in the children of the fields 

 a more determined tendency to religion and piety, than amongst the 

 dwellers in towns and cities, and that he conceived the reason to be 

 obvious — that the inhabitants of the country were less accustomed to 

 the works of man's hands than to those of God. May not the 



