3o6 



NATURE 



\Aug. 15. 1872 



tion to nil the members of the Association, who will be 

 admitted free, but " only a limited number daily." The 

 great number of Lady Associates already announced is a 

 prominent feature of the present meeting. 



The following distinguished foreigners have already an- 

 nounced their intention of being present, viz. : — 



Prof. Hubert, President of the Geological Society of 

 France ; I'rof. van Bencden, of Louvain, and his son, a 

 naturalist of great ability ; Prof Janssen, of Paris ; Prof 

 Panceri, of Naples; Prof. H. A. Nicholson, of Toronto ; 

 Prof Zengler, of Prague ; Prof. Hale, of Albany, U.S. ; 

 while invitations have been sent to the following, who have 

 been compelled reluctantly to decline the invitation : — 



Prof Hofmeister, Prof Sir W. G. Logan, of Montreal ; 

 Prof. Clebsch, of Gottingen ; Prof Daubre'e, of Paris; 

 Prof Young, of Dartmouth College, U.S. ; Prof. Asa 

 Gray, of Cambridge, U.S. ; Prof Gibbs, of Cambridge, 

 U.S. ; Principal Dawson, of Montreal ; M. Ouatrefages, 

 of Paris ; Prof Kirchhoff, of Heidelberg ; Prof. Helmholtz, 

 of Berlin ; Prof Shaler, of Harvard College, U.S. 



The customary courtesy of the officers of the Associa- 

 tion has enabled us to give our readers this week the 

 President's Address, as well as the opening addresses in 

 Sections A, B, C, and D. 



Lv.vuGURAL Address OF Dr. William Carpenter, F.R.S., 

 President 

 Thirty-six years have now elapsed since at the first and (I 

 regret to say) 'he only meeting of this Association held in 

 Bristol — which Ancient City followed immediately upon our 

 National Universities in giving it a welcome — 1 enjoyed tlie 

 privilege which I hold it one of the most valuable functions of 

 these Annual assemblages to bestow ; that of coming into per- 

 sonal relation with those distinguished Men whose names are to 

 every cultivator of Science as "household words," and the liglit 

 of whose brilliant example, and the warmth of whose cordial 

 encouragement are the most precious influences by which his own 

 aspirations can be fostered and directed. Under the Presidency 

 of the Marquis of Lansdowne, with Conybeare and Prichard as 

 Vice-Presidents, with Vernon Ilarcourt as General Secretary, 

 and John Phillips as Assistant Secretary, were gathered together 

 Whewell and Peacock, James Forbes and Sir W. Kovvan 

 Hamilton, Murchison and Sedgwick, Buckland and De la Beche, 

 Henslow and Daubeny, Roget, Richardson, and Edward Forbes, 

 with many others, perhaps not less distinguished, of whom my 

 own recollection is less vivid. 



Ill his honoured oUl age, Sedgwick still retains, in the Acade- 

 mic home of his life, all his pristine interest in whatever bears 

 on the advance of the Science he has adorned as well as 

 enriched ; and Phillips still cultivates with all his old enthusiasm 

 the congenial soil to which he has been transpl.anted. But the 

 rest — our fathers and elder brother, — "Where are they?" It 

 is for us of the present generation to show that they live in our 

 lives ; to carry forward the work which they commenced ; and to 

 transmit tlie inlluonce of their own e.vample to our own successors. 



There is one of these great men, whose departure from among 

 us since last we met claims a special notice, and whose life — full 

 as it was of years and honours — we should have all desired to see 

 prolonged for a few months, could its feebleness have been un- 

 attended with suffering. For we should all then have sympa- 

 thised with Murchison, in the delight with which he would have 

 received the intelligence of the safety of the friend in whose 

 scientific labours and personal welfare he felt to the last the 

 keenest interest. That this intelligence, which our own Expe- 

 dition for the relief of Livingstone would have obtained (we will 

 hope) a few months later, should have been brought to us through 

 the generosity of one, and the enterprising ability — may I not 

 use our peculiarly English word, the "pluck" — of another of 

 our American brethren, cannot but be a matter of national regret 

 to us. But let us bury that regret in the common joy which both 

 Nations feel in the result ; and while we give a cordial welcome 

 to Mr. Stanley, let us glory in the prospect now opening, that 

 En^hnd and America will co-operate in that noble object which 

 — far more than the discovery of the Sources of the Nile — our 

 great Traveller has set before himself as his true mission, the 

 Extinction of the Slave Trade. 



At the last Meeting of this Association I had the pleasure of 

 being able to announce that I had received from the First Lord 



of the Admiralty a favourable reply to a representation I had 

 ventured to make to him, as to the importance of prosecuting on 

 a more extended scale the course of inquiry into the Physical and 

 Biological conditions of the Deep Sea, on which, with my col- 

 leagues Prof. Wyville Tliomson and Mr. J. Gwyn Jeffr«ys, I had 

 been engaged for the three preceding years. That for which I 

 had asked was a Circumnavigating Expedition of at le.ast three 

 years' duration, provided with an adequate Scientific Staff, and 

 with the most complete Equipment tliat our experience could 

 devise. The Council of the Royal Society having been led by 

 the encouraging tenor of the answer 1 had received, to make a 

 formal application to this effect, the liberal arrangements of the 

 Government 'have been carried out under the advice of a .Scien- 

 tific Committee which included Representatives of tliis Associa- 

 tion. 11. i^L ship Challenger, a vessel in every way suitable for 

 the purpose, is now being fitted out at Sheerness ; the command 

 of the Expedition is intrusted to Captain Nares, an Officer of 

 whose high qualifications I have myself the fullest assurance ; 

 while the Scientific charge of it will be taken by my excellent 

 friend Prof. Wyville Thomson, at whose suggestion it was that 

 these investigations were originally commenced, and whose zeal 

 for the efficient prosecution of them is shown by his relinquish- 

 ment for a time of the important Academic position he at present 

 fills. It is anticipated that the Expedition will sail in November 

 next ; and I feel sure that the good wishes of all of you will go 

 along with it. 



The confident anticipation expressed by my predecessor, that 

 for the utilisation of the total Eclipse of the Sun then im- 

 pending, our Government would "exercise the same Avise 

 liberality as heretofore in the interests of Science," has been 

 amply fulfilled. An Eclipse-Expedition to India was organised 

 at the charge of the Home Government, and placed under the 

 direction of Mr. Lockyer; the Indian Government contributed 

 its quota to the work ; and a most valuable body of results was 

 obtained, of wliich, with those of the previous year, a Report is 

 now being prepared under the direction of the Council of the 

 Astronomical Society. 



It has been customary with successive occupants of this Chair, 

 distinguished as Leaders in their several divisions of the noble 

 Army of Science, to open the proceedings of the Meetings over 

 which they lespectively presided, with a Discourse on some 

 aspect of Nature in Relation to Man. But I am not aware that 

 any one of them has taken up the other side of the inquiry— that 

 which concerns Man asthe "Interpreter of Nature;" and I have 

 therefore thought it not inappropriate to lead you to the con- 

 sideration of the Mental processes, by which are formed those 

 fundamental conceptions of Matter and Force, of Cause and 

 Effect, of Law and Order, which furnish the basis of all scientific 

 reasoning, and constitute the Philosophia pyinia of Bacon. There 

 is a great deal of what I cannot but regard as fallacious and mis- 

 leading Philosophy — " oppositions of Science falsely so called" 

 — abroad in the world at the present time. And I hope to 

 satisfy you, that those who set up their cnvn conceptions of the 

 Orderly Sequence which they discern in the Phenomena of 

 Nature, as fixed and determinate Labi's, by which those phe- 

 nomena not only tire within all Human experience, but always 

 //(?:■(■ lieeii, and always must I'e, invariably governed, are really 

 guilty of the Intellectual arrogance they condemn in the Systems 

 of the Ancients, and place themselves in diametrical antagonism 

 to those real Philosophers, by whose comprehensive grasp and 

 penetrating insight that Order has been so far disclosed. For 

 what love of the Truth, as it is in Nature, *as ever more con- 

 spicuous than th.it which Kepler displayed in his abandonment 

 of each of the ingenious conceptions of the Planetary System 

 which his fertile Imagination had successively devised, so soon as 

 it proved to be inconsistent with the facts disclosed by observa- 

 tion? In that almost admiring description of the way in which 

 his enemy Mars, " whom he had left at home as a despised 

 Captive," had " bur.st all the chains of the equations, an i broke 

 forth from the prisons of the tables," who does not recognise the 

 justice of Schiller's definition of the real Philosopher, as one who 

 always loves Truth better than his System ? And when at last 

 he had gained the full assurance of a success so complete that (as 

 he says) he thought he must be dreaming, or that he had been 

 reasoning in a circle, who does not feel the almost sublimity of 

 the self-abnegation, with which, after attaining what was in his 

 own estimation such a glorious reward of his life of toil, disap- 

 pointment, and self-sacrifice he abstains from claiming .the 

 applause of his contemporaries, but leaves his fame to after ages 

 in these noble words : — " The book is written ; to be read either 

 now or by posterity, I care not which. It may well wait a 



