90 ORGANISATION 



the case in Germany, that there should be neither 

 lectures nor scientific papers read at the evening 

 meetings. It is rather sleepy work in most cases 

 to rise from the dinner-table, where men have been 

 enjoying good cheer, and to sit down forthwith to 

 listen patiently to a scientific lecturer. There are 

 few persons whose vigilance will not at times be 

 overcome by this test/ It is not, indeed, given to 

 every lecturer to make easy such a test; thus 

 Whewell wrote in a letter on the Cambridge meeting 

 in 1845 : ' The performance in the evening was in the 

 Senate House. I did not go there . . . Herschel 

 read for an hour and a quarter without being 

 heard ' ; and this can scarcely be an isolated instance. 

 From time to time we come across the application 

 to Association meetings of such terms as ' picnics/ 

 ' junketings, 5 and even ' beanfeasts/ and by way of 

 specific illustration the following note by Sedgwick 

 on the Liverpool meeting in 1837 is worthy of 

 quotation : 1 ( Let me then transport you to Liver- 

 pool, among mountains of venison and oceans of 

 turtle. Were ever philosophers so fed before ? 

 Twenty hundred-weight of turtle were sent to 

 fructify in the hungry stomachs of the sons of science. 

 Well may they body forth, before another returning 

 festival, the forms of things unknown ! But I will 

 not anticipate the monsters of philosophy which such 

 a seed-time portends. The crop no doubt will be 

 of vast dimensions.' Murchison records a similar 

 impression. The cultivators of science themselves 

 were divided on the question of relaxation : A. C. 

 Ramsay notes Brewster's disgust when he and 



1 Life and Letters, i, 89. 



