xiv FOURTH REPORT 1834. 



ter mind to the solution of a specific difficulty proposed as a 

 pri/e question, necessarily produced a greater want of systema- 

 tic cooperation amongst scientific men in Britain than is to be 

 found in several countries not her political superiors. 



" The migratory scientific associations of Germany and Swit- 

 zerland — to which we gratefully acknowledge that our British 

 one owes its rise, — embrace only one class of the objects to 

 which we have above alluded as characterizing this Body. Their 

 aim was simply to promote the intercourse of scientific men, 

 and to diffuse a taste for the prosecution of science. Their ex- 

 istence is not permanent, — they execute no functions but for the 

 moments during which their members are once a-year assembled, 

 — they regard not the past, and have no cares for the future, — 

 they merely receive and consider the communications which the 

 zeal of individual members places in their way. Such was at 

 first proposed to be the character of the Body this day assem- 

 bled, in imitation of the foreign meetings ; but a more extensive 

 design was subsequently adopted, and it was determined to 

 establish a permanent society, of which these annual reunions 

 should simply be the meetings, but which, by methods and by 

 influence peculiarly its own, should continue to operate during 

 the intervals of these public assemblies, and should aspire to 

 give an impulse to every part of the scientific system, to mature 

 scientific enterprise, and to direct the labours requisite for dis- 

 covery*. 



" If we now turn from the aims to the acts of the Associa- 

 tion, we shall find gratifying proof that these designs were not 

 chimerical, and that the primary machinery devised for effecting 

 them was wanting neither in efficiency nor in permanence. The 

 first and most signal proof which we can cite, is the produc- 

 tion of those Reports on the Progress of Science, which ap- 

 peared to be one of the most important objects of such an in- 

 stitution, and one which, beyond all dispute, no existing society 

 could have attempted. To call upon persons whose time was 

 in all cases more or less valuable, for such a devotion of it 

 as was required for a systematic and precise detail of the re- 

 cent progress of the sciences which they respectively culti- 

 vated, was to make a demand, the boldness of which cannot 

 perhaps well be appreciated but by those who have had expe- 

 rience in the labour of bringing together the substance of de- 

 tached, though often profound, papers in the extensive range of 

 scientific periodicals and academical collections. Yet so obvious 



• The author here described the share which some of the founders of the As- 

 sociation liad respectively talien in planning and conducting the institution. 



