16 FOUNDATION AND OBJECTS 



preparatory meeting, but so showy and glittering 

 that a stranger might have thought men had here 

 met together to turn philosophy into sport, rather 

 than to cultivate science in earnest. But it was only 

 the first proof, of which we afterwards received many, 

 of the kindly feelings and hospitality of the people 

 of York, which had induced them on this occasion 

 to assemble ladies and gentlemen with equal zeal 

 to do honour to science ' (Johnston). It was Phillips, 

 very appropriately, who gave the first scientific 

 address to the Association at this first informal 

 meeting : he spoke extempore on the more note- 

 worthy geological features of Yorkshire, and exhibited 

 specimens. The meeting took on a more formal 

 aspect on the following morning, when, on Brewster's 

 motion, Viscount Milton, President of the Yorkshire 

 Philosophical Society, took the chair. He addressed 

 the assemblage as ' Gentlemen/ and thereby dis- 

 covered a germ of future disputation ; for women 

 were not admitted to the earlier scientific meetings 

 of the Association. 1 Harcourt and Phillips then 

 spoke on the origin and organisation of the meeting, 

 and Harcourt formally proposed the foundation of 

 * a British Association for the Advancement of 

 Science, having for its objects, to give a stronger 

 impulse and more systematic direction to scientific 

 inquiry, to obtain a greater degree of national atten- 

 tion to the objects of science, and a removal of those 

 disadvantages which impede its progress, and to 



1 This became a burning question. Buckland wrote to Murchison, 

 in connexion with the second meeting : ' Everybody whom I spoke 

 to on the subject agreed that if the meeting is to be of scientific 

 utility, ladies ought not to attend the reading of the papers especially 

 in a place like Oxford as it would at once turn the thing into a sort 

 of Albemarle-dilettanti meeting.' See, further, p. 99. 



