32 



FOUNDATION AND OBJECTS 



England. In connexion with the Irish meeting a 

 picturesque story is vividly told in Sedgwick's ' Life 

 and Letters/ how, going from Liverpool to Dublin 

 by a special steamer detailed for the service of the 

 Association, he was called upon to baptise the infant 

 son of the captain on board ; how the congregation 

 assembled to the sound of a newly invented bell- 

 buoy which the vessel was just then passing ; and 

 how Sedgwick was moved by the occasion to a 

 wonderful address on the aims of science toward 

 divine truth. The second Irish meeting, at Cork 

 in 1843, was far less successful than the first : the 

 state of southern Ireland was at the time so unsettled 

 that Murchison was in serious doubt as to the safety 

 of holding a meeting there ; and the local arrange- 

 ments were indifferent, so that Murchison declared 

 that ' we never were so near shipwreck as at this 

 Cork meeting/ 



The majority of the leaders in the Association's 

 counsels at this period were in favour of restricting 

 the circuit of summer annual meetings to places 

 where a sufficiency of scientific support could be 

 relied upon, but this policy was opposed by no less 

 weighty an authority than Whewell. He advocated 

 an extended range : he wished the light of science 

 to be distributed as widely as possible through the 

 benighted provinces ; and he feared that any town 

 visited at too frequent intervals might take alarm 

 at the expense incurred in connexion with the 

 meetings. Thus with reference to the proposal that 

 a second meeting should be held at Cambridge in 1845, 

 an animated debate took place there in the previous 

 year, at which Whewell and Sedgwick were pro- 

 tagonists. Sedgwick went the length of inviting the 



