(6) 



each student amongst us selects one subject for the ex- 

 ercise 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 sur- 

 rounded. Thus, the geologist faces the rocks ; the biol- 

 ogist fronts the conditions and phenomena of life ; the 

 astronomer, stellar masses and motions ; the mathema- 

 tician the properties of space and number ; the chemist 

 pursues his atoms, while the physical investigator has 

 his own large field in optical, thermal, electrical, acous- 

 tical, and other phenomena. The British Association, 

 then, faces nature on all sides, and pushes knowledge 

 centrifugally outwards, while, through circumstance or 

 natural bent, each of its working members takes up a 

 certain line of research in which he aspires to be an 

 original producer, being content in all other directions 

 to accept instruction from his fellow-men. The sum of 

 our labors constitutes what Fichte might call the sphere 

 of natural knowledge. In the meetings of the Associa- 

 tion it is found necessary to resolve this sphere into its 

 component parts, which take concrete form under the 

 respective letters of our sections. 



This section (A) is called the Mathematical and Phys- 

 ical section. Mathematics and Physics have been long 

 accustomed to coalesce, and hence this grouping. For 

 while mathematics, as a product of the human mind, is 

 self-sustaining and nobly self-rewarding, while the pure 

 mathematician may never trouble his mind with consid- 

 erations regarding the phenomena of the material uni- 

 verse, still the form of reasoning which he employs, the 

 power which the organization of that reasoning confers, 

 the applicability of his abstract conceptions to actual 

 phenomena, render his science one of the most potent 



