The Period from 185 i to i860 9 



the Association naturally influenced its programs during the decade under 

 consideration. 



Presidential Addresses 

 A. D. Bache (geography), president of the Association for 1851, nor- 

 mally would have delivered his retiring address at the meeting scheduled 

 for Cleveland, Ohio, in August of 1852; but this meeting was postponed 

 because of the prevalence of cholera along the approaches to Cleveland from 

 the South. At the postponed meeting, held in July, 1853, Bache delivered 

 his address, without formal title, saying that it would be "a few remarks in 

 relation to the circumstances attending its (the Association's) organization, 

 and to its progress, and some considerations of the direction in which we 

 may look for its greatest usefulness." It is printed in the Proceedings for 

 1852, vol. 6. A short quotation will illustrate its tone. 



But is it true that genius is beyond or above the stimulus of association? Let the 

 man among us who has, if ever man had the true "divine breath," tell us, in simple and 

 single-heartedness, whether he left that meeting of the British Association the same 

 man who went there; whether the effect of that simple and single figure on the black- 

 board, which showed to the geologists of the day discoveries to be made, founded on 

 principles which created a new era in classification, was limited to his auditors, or even 

 to cultivators of science through whom they spread with lightning rapidity and vivid- 

 ness : did it not react on him ? 



Benjamin Peirce (mathematics), president of the Association in 1853 

 and distinguished for his work in abstract mathematics, delivered his ad- 

 dress as retiring president at the meeting held in Washington in May, 1854. 

 Like the address of his predecessor, it was without an explicit title but re- 

 ferred in eloquent terms to the Association and of its relations to the prog- 

 ress of science. It is printed in the Proceedings for 1854, vol. 8. Its style 

 may be inferred from its opening paragraph, which is by no means the most 

 ornate. 



In most offices, the duties terminate with the office, and the thing of the past, the 

 ex-officer, is to the present an unknown quantity. But it is not so with your President. 

 Science, with its time-annihilating power, which gives life to the fossil, which hurries 

 the embryo future into premature birth, which ventures beyond the grave even to the 

 foot of the invisible throne, sternly drags forward its reluctant presidents to their hard- 

 est trial when they have ceased to be, to a judgment after death severer than that of 

 Rhadamanthus. This calling out of the actor upon the stage after the night of perform- 

 ance, when the blood is no longer warm, is all the worse to him who has never before 

 made a set speech, all whose habits of thought are unknown to aesthetic display, and 

 the Arctic latitudes of whose frigid studies are impenetrable to the God of eloquence 

 and to the Muses who vibrate the silver-toned chords of human sympathy. 



James D. Dana (geology), president of the Association in 1854, de- 



