hii REPORT—1862. 
sought in vain amongst those who promptly performed their promises. Yet 
I may be permitted to say that I still hope to be enabled at some future time 
to complete the Report on Acoustics, of which I delivered merely an oral 
sketch at the second Meeting of the Association, in 1832. 
The Association quitted Cambridge to pursue, with its matured organization, 
and with continually increasing stability and influence, the career of brilhant 
and useful labours in every branch of Science that it has never ceased to run 
during the two-and-thirty years that have elapsed since its foundation. It 
revisited Cambridge after an interval of twelve years, in 1845; and now, after 
a lapse of seventeen years, we have the high gratification of welcoming once 
more the Association to this scene of its early meetings. 
This appears a fitting occasion for a concise review of the leading principles 
and prominent labours of the body. 
Scientific Societies, as usually constituted, receive and publish papers which 
are offered to them by individuals, but do not profess to suggest subjects for 
them, or to direct modes of investigation, except in some cases by offering 
prizes for the best Essay in some given branch. 
This Association, on the contrary, is not intended to receive and record 
individual originality. Its motto is, suéGESTION AND COOPERATION, and its 
purpose is thus to advance science by cooperation, in determinate lines of 
direction laid down by suggestion. 
To give form and authority to this principle, the admirable conception of 
suggestive Reports was in the first place developed; a collection that should 
constitute a general survey of the Sciences as they stood at the foundation of 
the Association, each branch reported by some member who had already shown 
his devotion to the cultivation of it by his own contribution to its advance- 
ment, and each Report passing in review its appointed subject, not for the 
purpose of teaching it, but of drawing forth the obscure and weak places of 
our knowledge of it, and thus to lay down the determinate lines of direction 
for new experimental or mathematical researches, which it was the object of 
the Association to obtain. 
The requests for these Reports were zealously responded to, and so rapidly 
that at the second Meeting ten were received, and at the third eight others. 
In this manner in fiye or six years the cycle of the Sciences was well nigh 
exhausted ; but the series of such Reports has been maintained in succeeding 
years, even to the present time, by the necessity of supplemental Reports, to 
point out not merely the advances of each science already treated, but the 
new lines of direction for inquiry that develope themselves at every step in 
advance. 
The Reports thus described were entitled “On the progress and desiderata 
of the respective branch of Science,” or “ On the state of our knowledge re- 
specting such Science,” and must be considered as merely preparations for 
the great work for which the Association was formed. They constitute the 
suggestive part of the scheme: the cooperative mechanism by which each 
new line of research recommended in the Reports was to be explored, was 
energetically set in motion by the annual appointment of Committees or indi- 
viduals to whom these especial investigations were respectively assigned, with 
adequate sums at their disposal. 
These Committees were requested to report their labours from year to year, 
and thus a second set of documents have been produced, entitled “‘ Reports of 
Researches undertaken at the request of the Association,” which are entirely 
distinct from the “suggestive Reports,’ but immediately derived from them, 
and complementary to them, 
