34 FOUNDATION AND OBJECTS 



scientific friends . . . urging them to join this new 

 Association. But notwithstanding my energy, the 

 scheme was for the most part pooh-poohed. . . . 

 When ... we were congregated from all parts, the 

 feebleness of the body scientific was too apparent. 

 From London we had no strong men of other branches 

 of science, and I was but a young president of the 

 geologists; from Cambridge no one, but apologies 

 from Whewell, Sedgwick, and others ; from Oxford 

 we had Daubeny only, with apologies from Buckland 

 and others. . . . We were but a meagre squad to 

 represent British science. . . . 



' Indeed, William Conybeare, afterwards Dean 

 of Llandaff, had quizzed us unmercifully, as well as 

 W. Broderip and Stokes, and other men of science. 

 The first of these had said that if a central part of 

 England were chosen for the meeting, and the science 

 of London and the South were to be weighed against 

 the science of the North, the meeting ought to be 

 held in the Zoological Gardens of the Kegent's Park ! 

 It required, therefore, no little pluck to fight up 

 against all this opposition. . . / 



Murchison's biographer adds the following note 

 to the above quotation : ' As an illustration of the 

 kind of taunts amid which the British Association 

 was born, the following sentence may be quoted 

 from a letter written by J. G. Lockhart, editor of 

 the Quarterly Review, to Murchison just before the 

 meeting : "I presume you are going to the colt-show 

 at York. Don't make a fool of yourself among these 

 twaddlers, who must, in such strength of reunion 

 (considering what happens in all their minor associa- 

 tions), be enough to disturb the temper, if not the 

 brains of the a-o^cbraToi,, of which number is, of 



