British Association for the Advancement of Science. 479 



already sent in their adhesion. In June next, the association 

 convenes at Oxford. There never was such an assemblage of 

 men convened in so magnificent a city before. We shall en- 

 deavour to give our readers a faithful account of what it is our 

 misfortune, not to be able to be a personal spectator of. 



Thus will this great association be annually employed, visiting 

 the principal cities of Great Britain, in, to use the eloquent lan- 

 guage of Mr. Johnston,* 



Gathering into its stores the genius and information of every district, 

 awakening men, wherever it bends its footsteps, to the dignitj' and import- 

 ance of science, and scattering into every corner, as it passes through the 

 land, some new seeds of valuable discovery, and which, duly fostered, may 

 ripen into a harvest of resources hitherto not known, and therefore unde- 

 veloped,— an institution, which, limited to no science, can comprehend, with- 

 in its ample bounds, the votaries of every branch of knowledge, ready each, 

 and willing to eliminate, by the conjoint researches of all, those complicated 

 mysteries of nature which the most ardent philosophers are ever meeting 

 within their single and isolated investigations, and which even the united 

 efforts of all the cultivators of any one department could never have re- 

 vealed. 



There has been a great deal said about the march of intellect, 

 which has almost become a bye-word, because of the misdirec- 

 tion which some have sought to give to those powers of reasoning 

 which all men, more or less, possess. This will always be the 

 case, where the knowledge of words, rather than that of things, 

 receives an intellectual consideration, due only to that kind of 

 knowledge, which is inseparable from a sound judgment. Amidst 

 all the extravagances of this siecle de m&uvement — we use the 

 term on account of the appropriateness of the language, and not 

 from an inclination to write French for English readers — we see 

 an ultimate regenerating principle for society, in the increasing 

 inclination for the study of nature. All her phenomena are 

 produced by invariable laws, and such are the plastic powers of 

 the human mind, that the habit of considering the relations of 

 physical things, is gradually adopted by us, for the consideration 

 of moral things ; and as we find out that we cannot imitate na- 

 ture, but by the application of her unchanging ways, so neither 

 can we follow up the moral laws of the Author of nature, but 

 by the aid of his immutable principles of truth and justice. We 

 think that the love and study of nature, will eventually subdue 



* Brewster, Jan. 1832, p. 1. 



