394 Meeting of British Association, 



based on general statistics. A new Association has recently been 

 formed, imitating our perambulating habits, and striving to com- 

 prehend in its investigations and discussions even a still more ex- 

 tended range of subjects, in what is called "Social Science.'* 

 These efforts deserve our warmest approbation and good will. 

 May they succeed in obtaining a purely and strictly scientific 

 character 1 Our own Association has, since its Meeting at Dublin, 

 recognized the growing claims of Political Economy to scientific 

 brotherhood, and admitted it into its Statistical Section. It could 

 not have dona so under abler guidance and happier auspices than 

 the Presidency of the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Whately, ^hose 

 efforts in this direction are so universally appreciated. Bute/en in 

 this Section, and whilst Statistics alone were treated i ^ % the 

 Association as far back as 1833, made it a rule th?', h. fder to 

 ensure positive results, only those classes of facts should be a .mitted 

 which were capable of being expressed by numbers, a.id which 

 promised, when sufficiently multiplied, to indicate general laws. 



If, then, the main object of Science — and I beg to be understood 

 henceforth, as speaking only of that Section which the Association 

 has under its special care, viz., Inductive Science — if, I say, the 

 object of Science is the discovery of the laws which govern natural 

 phenomena, the primary condition for its success is — accurate ob- 

 servation and collection of facts in such comprehensiveness and 

 completeness as to furnish the philosopher with the necessary 

 material from which to draw safe conclusions. 



SCIENTIFIC MEMOIRS AND REPORTS. 



One of the latest undertakings of the Association has been, in 

 conjunction with the Royal Society, to attempt the compilation 

 of a classified catalogue of Scientific Memoirs, which, by combining 

 under one head the titles of all memoirs written on a certain sub- 

 ject, will, when completed, enable the student who wishes to gain 

 information on that subject to do so with the greatest ease. It 

 gives him, as it were, the plan of the house, and the key to the 

 different apartments in which the treasures relating to his subject 

 are stored, saving him at once a painful and laborious search, and 

 affording him at the same time an assurance that what is here 

 offered contains the whole of the treasures yet acquired. 



While this has been one of its latest attempts, the Association 

 has from its very beginning kept in view that its main sphere 

 of usefulness lay in that concentrated attention to all scientific 

 operations which a geneial gives to the movements of his army, 



