THE COUNCIL. 3 



the principal promoters of the Meeting, to propose a plan for 

 the conduct of it, and for the establishment of a general 

 system on which similar Meetings might continue to be 

 conducted hereafter. 



It is not requisite, in this Report, to enter into a detailed 

 account of the provisions of this plan, because they are on the 

 point of being pubhshed in the Report of the British Associa- 

 tion for the advancement of Science, by the order of the 

 Committee appointed to revise them. The general principles 

 which distinguish it from the plan of the German Meetings 

 are these : in the first place, instead of confining the Meetings 

 to authors only and professed men of science, whilst it invites 

 such persons to be the leaders and rulers of the Association, it 

 aims also at diffusing more widely the spurit of scientific inquiry, 

 and bringing new labourers into the field ; in the second 

 place, instead of being content with deriving indirect advantage 

 from the Meetings, it employs them expressly as the means of 

 giving a powerful impulse and determinate direction to philo- 

 sophical inquiry, and of carrying on the advancement of 

 science by a comprehensive system of co-operative exertion. 



The object of this system is not only to give connection to 

 the efforts of insulated inquirers, but to link Societies them- 

 selves together, in unity of purpose and in a common partici- 

 pation and division of labour. There are many important 

 questions in philosophy, and some entire departments of science, 

 the data of which are geographically distributed, and require 

 to be collected by local observations extended over a whole 

 country ; and this is true not only of those facts on which 

 single sciences are founded, but of many which are of more 

 enlarged application. Thus, for instance, were the elevation 

 above the sea of all the low levels and chief heights and emi- 

 nences m a country ascertained, so generally that every 

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