ADDRESS. XXXix 
_ into politics, have been invariably restricted to the branch of the science 
_ which deals in facts and numbers; and as no one individual has contributed 
‘more to the storehouse of such valuable knowledge than Mr. George Porter 
‘(asevidenced even by his report in our last volume), so may we believe that 
in this town, with which he is intimately connected, he will contribute to 
raise still higher the claims of the Section over which he is so well qualified 
to preside. 
If in this discourse I have referred somewhat more largely to those 
branches of science which pertain to the general division of natural history, 
in which alone I can venture to judge of the progress made by others, Jet me 
however say, that no member of this body can appreciate more highly than 
I do, the claims of the mathematical and experimental parts of philosophy, 
in which my friend Professor Baden Powell of Oxford, who supports me as 
a Vice-President of this meeting, has taken so distinguished a part. No one 
__has witnessed with greater satisfaction the attendance at our former meetings 
of men, from all parts of Europe, the most eminent in these high pursuits. 
No one can more glory in having been an officer of this Association when 
it was honoured with the presence of its illustrious correspondent Bessel, 
than whom the world has never produced a more profound astronomer. 
If among his numerous splendid discoveries he furnished astronomers with 
what they had so long and so ardently desired—a fixed and ascertained point 
in the immensity of space, beyond the limits of our own sidereal system, it is 
to Bessel, as 1 am assured by a contemporary worthy of him, that Englishmen — 
owe a debt of gratitude for his elaborate discussion of the observations of their 
immortal Bradley, which, in his hands, became the base of modern astronomy. 
Passing from this recollection, so proud yet so mournful to us all as 
_ friends and admirers of the deceased Prussian astronomer, can any one see with 
more delight than myself the brilliant concurrence at our present Meeting of 
naturalists, geologists, physiologists, ethnologists and statists, with mathemati- 
cians, astronomers, mechanicians, and experimental philosophers in physics and 
in chemistry? Surely then I may be allowed to signalize a particular ground of 
gratification among so many, in the presence at this Meeting of two individuals 
im our Experimental Sections, to one of whom, our eminent foreign associate 
Oersted, we owe the first great link between electric and magnetic phenomena, 
by showing the magnetic properties of the galvanic current; whilst the other, 
our own Faraday, among other new and great truths which have raised the 
character of English science throughout the world, obtained the converse 
_ proof by evoking electricity out of magnets. And if it be not given to the 
geologist whom you have honoured with this chair, to explain how such arcana 
have been revealed, still, as a worshiper in the outer portico of the temple of 
physical science, he may be permitted to picture to himself the delight which 
_ the Danish philosopher must have felt, when on returning to our shores, after 
an absence of a quarter of a century, he found that the grand train of dis- 
covery of which he is the progenitor, had just received its crowning accession 
_ in England from his former disciple, who, after a long and brilliant series 
_ of investigations peculiarly his own, has shown that magnetic or dia-magnetic 
f forces are distributed throughout all nature. 
_ And thus shall we continue to be a true British Association, with cosmo- 
‘ _ polite connexions, so long as we have among us eminent men to attract such 
foreign contemporaries to our shores. If then at the last assembly we ex- 
_perienced the good effects which flowed from a concentration of mathe- 
“Maticians and magneticians, drawn together from different European king- 
_ doms—if then also the man* of solid learning, who then represented the 
sh; * Mr. Everett. 
eee: - 
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