59.0.4 REPORT—1849. 
results or understand its purpose. In fact, as the invention of a new machine 
or process of manufacture is evidence that the old is becoming inadequate to 
meet the demand which it formerly satisfied; so the feelings which have so 
successfully called into being our Association here, and similar institutions 
abroad, may be regarded as a proof that the existing agencies fo r the develop- 
ment of scientific knowledge were becoming unequal to their work, and that 
some higher power must be sought, of energy commensurate to the increasing 
pressure. Such a power, I think, it is now certain that we afford. It is 
possible that the form of this great experiment may receive sume modifica- 
tion; for example, that it may involve a yet wider application of the mighty 
principle on which it is based, and become a union not only of persons but 
of institutions. But we have established beyond doubt that it is a trial in 
the right direction,—that its principle is the true one, the principle of Asso- 
ciation. It may perhaps seem trivial to attach importance to such an asser- 
tion; in commercial enterprise, in manufactures, in politics its truth is 
universally confessed; what then is there new in applying it to science? 
Nothing, assuredly : in fact science, at least physical science, owes to it almost 
its very existence, and certainly its progress; and the wonder is that none 
seem to have fully comprehended this before the founders of the British 
Association. Observe, that though physical science is of recent birth, physical 
knowledge has been an object of desire from the very origin of our race. 
Some have followed it for the sake of the powers which it conferred; and 
some from the high instinct which reveals to a noble mind the beauty and 
majesty of such pursuits. In the first glimmer of history, the astronomy of 
the Assyrian Magi looms through the darkness; the geometry which might 
have been its champion and guide appears in no feeble development even 
in the fabulous antiquity of India. The sepulchres of Etruria and Egypt, 
the palaces of Nineveh, are giving up to us relics of art that imply in high 
perfection the existence of that practical chemistry which was transmitted to 
us through their Arabian successors. When we look at the marvellous archi- 
tecture of the middle ages, we find a mastery of the principles of equilibrium 
and pressure, that fills the mind capable of appreciating it with delight beyond 
even what its surpassing beauty inspires; and we know from the writings of 
Roger Bacon and Kircher that many facts of experimental physics were cur- 
rent in the cloister. The elements were in existence, but some power was 
wanting which could combine them into a body and give it life. That power 
was free, open, honest association. Not intellectual energy or acuteness : 
the Greeks possessed that to an extent never perhaps equalled by any other 
people; but they were made incapable of steady union for any purpose, by 
the strange elements of repulsion which seemed inherent in their nature and 

