Professor Forbes's Address to tJie British Jssociatio?i. 249 



have been in existence for near two centuries, and these have 

 (lone much to the due advancement of science itself, as well 

 as the promotion of a more general taste for its cultivation. 

 They were admirably adapted to the period of their institu- 

 tion, when the difficulties of ordinary communication, and 

 the want of scientific journals, made the Royal Society of Lon- 

 don the great centre of philosophical information, — when new 

 experiments were there first repeated, — when new theories were 

 there first discussed, — and when its transactions, and those of 

 the other academies of Europe — fraught with the literary trea- 

 sures which Hooke and Wren, and Boyle, and Leibnitz, and 

 the Bernouillis loved to display, and which Newton alone loved 

 to conceal— were the couriers which published to Europe the 

 intelligence of the successive intellectual victories of that mighty 

 age. Rarely even then, however, and latterly still less, did these 

 societies attempt to guide in any specific direction the investi- 

 gations of their members, or to form any school of science for 

 the initiation of fresh inquirers. The formation of such schools 

 of disciples who voluntarily combined under some philosopher 

 of eminence, partly did away with the necessity of this on the 

 Continent ; whilst the total want of any thing similar in our 

 own country, and the less specific objects of those honorary re- 

 wards which from time to time have been given by learned so- 

 cieties in aU countries, and which have occasionally drawn forth 

 all the powers of some master mind to the solution of a specific 

 difficulty proposed as a prize question, necessarily produced a 

 greater want of systematic co-operation amongst scientific men 

 in Britain than is to be found in several countries not her poli- 

 tical superiors. 



The migratory Scientific Associations of Germany and Swit- 

 zerland — to which we gratefully acknowledge that our British 

 pne owes its rise,— embrace only one class of the objects to 

 which we have above alluded as characterizing this Body. 

 Their aim was simply to promote the intercourse of scientific 

 men, and to diffuse a taste for the prosecution of science. 

 Their existence is not permanent, — they execute no functions 

 but for the moments during which their members are once a- 

 year assembled, — they regard not the past, and have no cares 



