76 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



Association. We have here a body of men engaged 

 in the pursuit of Natural Knowledge, but variously 

 engaged. While sympathising with each of its depart- 

 ments, and supplementing his culture by knowledge 

 drawn from all of them, each student amongst us selects 

 one subject for the exercise of his own original faculty 

 one line, along which he may carry the light of his 

 private intelligence a little way into the darkness by 

 which all knowledge is surrounded. Thus, the geologist 

 deals with the rocks ; the biologist with the conditions 

 and phenomena of life ; the astronomer with stellar 

 masses and motions ; the mathematician with the rela- 

 tions of space and number ; the chemist pursues his 

 atoms ; while the physical investigator has his own 

 large field in optical, thermal, electrical, acoustical, and 

 other phenomena. The British Association then, as a 

 whole, faces physical nature on all sides, and pushes 

 knowledge centrifugally outwards, the sum of its labours 

 constituting what Fichte might call the sphere of 

 natural knowledge. In the meetings of the Association 

 it is found necessary to resolve this sphere into its 

 component parts, which take concrete form under the 

 respective letters of our Sections. 



Mathematics and Physics have been long accus- 

 tomed to coalesce, and here they form a single section. 

 No matter Jiow subtle a natural phenomenon may be, 

 whether we observe it in the region of sense, or follow 

 it into that of imagination, it is in the long run 

 reducible to mechanical laws. But the mechanical 

 data once guessed or given, mathematics are all-power- 

 ful as an instrument of deduction. The command 

 of Geometry over the relations of space, and the far- 

 reaching power which Analysis confers, are potent both 

 as means of physical discovery, and of reaping the entire 

 fruits of discovery. Indeed, without mathematics, ex- 



