46 PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



It has not failed to attract such intellect ; but we must 

 no longer labour a single point. Before further 

 considering the applications of science, we may com- 

 pare the pertinent assertion of Silvanus Thompson l : 

 ' There never was an age so rich in minds of 

 the first order in science. The nineteenth century 

 has, intellectually, been the golden age, not of art or 

 of poetry, not of drama or of adventure, but of 

 science. It has been an epoch distinguished by a 

 galaxy of men who made it great, and who, whether 

 the world recognises it or not, were great men/ 



To trace the progress of science since 1831 through 

 successive meetings of the British Association is 

 impossible in this place. In attempting an outline 

 of that progress, however, it may be premised that 

 the Association has neglected no single step in it. 

 The massive series of the annual reports record it 

 in the pronouncements of presidents and sectional 

 presidents from their chairs, in the reports of research 

 committees, and to some extent, but not, as we shall 

 find, by any means so fully, in the summaries of 

 sectional transactions. 



At the time of the foundation of the Association, 

 science was already a powerful body corporate : the 

 period of more or less isolated investigations into 

 individual phenomena, undertaken as dictated by 

 the genius of a few individual thinkers, had already 

 passed away. The interrelation of phenomena was 

 recognised, and the leading cultivators of science 

 were men of wide range of interests not those of 

 the type identified with a common popular concep- 

 tion of the * scientist ' (as he is popularly termed) 



1 Life of Lard Kelvin, p. 1213. 



