1922. Review. 103 



REVIEW. 



THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 



The British Association for the Advancement of Science.— A Retrospect. 



1831-1921. By O. J. R. HowARTH, O.B.E., M.A., Secretary (London : 

 British Association, Burlington House. 1922). Pp. viii. -I-318. Price, 

 75. 6rf. 



The remark of a Dublin alderman that Ireland had good scientific 

 men and need not extend a welcome to the British Association showed, 

 not only his insularity, but a misapprehension of the word " British," 

 as covering what appertains to a geographical entity, the British Isles. 

 Mr. Howarth's timely volume makes it clear that the Association is not 

 an English or a Scotch body extending its favours to an adjacent colony, 

 but that it was built up from the first on principles of equahty and 

 fraternity. Its fifth meeting was held in Dublin (1835), under the 

 presidency of Bartholomew Lloyd, Provost of Trinity College, and President 

 of the Royal Irish Academy from 1835 to 1837 ; Cork was visited in 1843, 

 when another Irishman, the Earl of Rosse, was President ; and in 1852 

 Sir Edward Sabine, who was at any rate born in Dublin, presided over a 

 meeting in Belfast. From Mr. Howarth's useful Appendix II. we can 

 easily quote the other Irish meetings : — 1857, Dublin ; 1874, Belfast, 

 with John Tyndall, a farmer's son from the County of Carlow, as an 

 electrifying President ; 1878, Dublin ; 1902, Belfast ; 1908, Dublin. 

 The astronomer, Thomas Roniney Robinson, then rector of Carrie kmacross, 

 presided at Birmingham in 1849 ; George Gabriel Stokes, son of the rector 

 of Skreen, in the County of Sligo, at Exeter in 1869 ; Sir William Thomson 

 [Lord Kelvin] at Edinburgh in 1871 ; Thomas Andrews of Belfast at 

 Glasgow in 1876; and Sir Charles A. Parsons at Bournemouth in 1919. 

 We thus trace at least nine Irishmen as presidents of the " British" 

 Association. 



For the commonwealth of scientific workers no such list is needed. 

 The iVssociation provides, as its founders hoped, a meeting-ground for 

 all who are interested in the outcome of research. It is important to 

 learn that the revival of a federal spirit in Germany at the close of the 

 Napoleonic tyranny promoted the formation of a Deutscher Naturforscher 

 Versammlung in 1822, under the inspiration of the naturalist-philosopher, 

 Larenz Oken (we Ockenfuss) ; our debt to the German model is here 

 happily pointed out. The portraits of the founders and early leaders 

 of the British Association would alone assure a welcome to the work. 

 We have the kindly honest face of John Phillips, who taught in Dublin 

 University in later years ; Murchison, with his favourite air of a com- 

 manding officer in the Peninsular war — his active service ended as an 

 ensign at Coruiia ; Tyndall, evidently under Carlylean influences ; and 

 the splendid head of Huxley as many of us knew him in the " eighties." 

 Like^vise Adam Sedgwick, who baptized the sea-captain's baby between 

 Liverpool and Dublin (p. 32) when coming to the meeting of 1835 ; 



