PROCEEDINGS OF THE MEETING. xiu 



a continued and especial attention to the subject. The con- 

 sideration of these points will therefore properly form a part 

 of the business of the Sectional Meetings ; and all Members of 

 the Association, according to their own peculiar pursuits 

 and means, will thus have the opportunity of supplying any 

 wanting knowledge, and of throwing light upon any existing 

 perplexity. 



" But besides this special examination of the suggestions 

 which your Reports contain, there are some more general 

 reflexions to which they naturally give rise, which may perhaps 

 be properly brought forward upon this first General Assembly 

 of the present Meeting ; and which, if they are well founded, 

 may preside over and influence the aims and exertions of many 

 of us, both during our present discussions and in our future 

 attempts to further the ends of science. 



" There is here neither time nor occasion for any but the 

 most rapid survey of the subjects to which your Reports refer, 

 in the point of view in which the Reports place them before 

 you. Astronomy, which stands first on the list, is not only 

 the queen of sciences, but, in a stricter sense of the term, the 

 only perfect science ; — the only branch of human knowledge 

 in which particulars are completely subjugated to generals, 

 effects to causes ; — in which the long observation of the past 

 has been, by human reason, twined into a chain which binds 

 in its links the remotest events of the future ; — in which we 

 are able fully and clearly to intei'pret Nature's oracles, so that 

 by that which we have tried we receive a prophecy of that 

 which is untried. The rules of all our leading facts have 

 been made out by observations of which the science began 

 with the earliest dawn of history ; the grand law of causation 

 by which they are all bound together has been enunciated for 

 150 years; and we have in this case an example of a science 

 in that elevated state of flourishing maturity, in which all that 

 remains is to determine with the extreme of accuracy the con- 

 sequences of its rules by the profoundest combinations of 

 mathematics, the magnitude of its data by the minutest scru- 

 pulousness of observation ; in which, further, its claims are so 

 fully acknowledged, that the public wealth of every nation pre- 

 tending to civilization, the most consummate productions of 

 labour and skill, and the loftiest and most powerful intellects 

 which appear among men, are gladly and emulously assigned 

 to the task of adding to its completeness. In this condition of 

 the science, it will readily be understood that Professor Airy, 

 your Reporter upon it, has had to mark his desiderata, in no 

 cases but those where some further developement of calcula- 



