PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES. 57 
SouTHAMPTON MicroscorrcaL Socrery. 
The annual sozrée of this association was held at the Hartley 
Institution on Tuesday evening, Dec. Lith. There were about six 
hundred ladies and gentlemen present, by invitation from the 
committee of management. The arrangements were such as met 
the approbation of all present. Dr. Joseph Bullar, the President, 
delivered the annual address as follows : 
Ladies and Gentlemen,—Another year has passed since we 
met, and I have now the honour to express, on behalf of the 
Southampton Microscopical Society, the pleasure they feel at 
seeing you again at their annual soirée. Meetings such as this 
indicate the increasing taste among the public for natural science, 
and the endeavour of those who cultivate science as the very 
business of their lives to make the knowledge they acquire and the 
facts they discover the common property of all. Everything 
conspires to aid an increasing activity of mind—a rational curiosity 
in this direction. Steam has become as great a power in the dif- 
fusion of science, as in locomotion and manufactures. Men of 
creative minds—the discoverers of new truths, are, and ever will 
be, the few; but the discoveries of these few are now diffused 
with a rapidity and to an extent amongst all highly civilised 
peoples hitherto unknown and unimagined. In a few days the 
new fact, the result, it may be, of years of solitary research and 
thought, becomes known to every man of science in Europe. Not 
only the debates and contests of the politician, the victories or 
defeats of war, or the triumphs of the social reformer, are circulated 
with the same certainty as the return of day and night; but the 
news of the contests of science with the hidden secrets of nature, 
of her triumphal discoveries, and of her application of these 
newly discovered laws to the beneficial uses of mankind, is diffused 
with the same sureness and celerity, and by the same means— 
the press and the steam engine. In addition to scientific papers 
and magazines, and reports and books, copiously illustrated by 
drawings, engravings, woodcuts, and plans—and scientific instru- 
ments described and measured and figured with perfect accuracy— 
the instruments themselves are immediately constructed by the 
first mathematicians of the day, so that any one can purchase 
them. The new fact may thus be immediately examined and 
proved by the exact copies of the apparatus or instrument of the 
original discoverer. A Greek philosopher said there was the same 
difference between one instructed and one uninstructed as between 
the living and the dead; and this generation, which is 
“The Heir of all the Ages, in the foremost files of Time,” 
shows by its valuing and taking advantage of the new objects so 
freely offered to its intellect, that it isa living and not a dead or 
