TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 753 



read on the occasion seems to have been preserved, nor are the minutes of the 

 Glasffow meeting in 1840 at all more interesting. 



The meeting of our Section at Plymouth, in 1841, produced nothing that 

 invites remark, but in the volume for 1842 there is a Report on the Vital Statistics 

 of the large towns of Scotland, drawn up under the authority of some of the 

 members of Section F, which had a certain importance. 



Our Section was not very active at the Cork meeting in 1843, nor again when 

 we met in this city in 1844. 



The proceedings in 184o, 1846 and 1847 were somewhat more notable, but are 

 very briefly reported, and the same may be said of all the years up to and inclusive 

 of 1855. Observe that I am far from admitting that they were not useful in their 

 day, as stimulating discussion and leading to valuable legislation. They have had 

 the fate of the heroes who lived before Agamemnon. The persons who made the 

 brief resumes of the papers read in those years, which are to be found in our 

 annual volumes, but ill-supplied the place of the ' vates sacer.' 



The last meeting at which our Section assembled under its old title and in its old 

 conditions was that held at Glasgow in 1855, and our last president was Lord 

 Houghton, then Mr. Monckton Milnes. 



In 1856 at Cheltenham, a resolution was passed, I believe, on the initiative 

 of that highly gifted, all-accomplished and ever-helpful man, which changed the 

 name of Section F, and made it, what it has remained ever since, the Section of 

 Economic Science and Statistics. 



On that occasion too, our proceedings were for the first time opened by an 

 address, though that address, having been prepared before the resolution just 

 alluded to was passed, dealt exclusively with the subject of statistics. That it was 

 ably dealt with, you will conclude, when I say that the author of the address was 

 Lord Stanley, now Lord Derby, for even then, a quarter of a century ago, he had 

 begun to display on all public occasions that wide knowledge and painstaking 

 mastery of his subject, which have given him so great an influence amongst 

 educated men of all parties in England, and which it is safe to prophesy will, 

 when a sufficiently large selection of his addresses is rescued from the newspapers 

 and published, give him in some respects a greater name with posterity than almost 

 any statesman of our times. The main object of his address on this occasion was 

 to urge the advantage of establishing a Statistical Department of Government, 

 charged with the annual publication of such facts, relative to the management of 

 internal reform, as are reducible to numerical expression. 



In 1857 Archbishop Whately, who was by that time far advanced in years, 

 and no longer the Whately of the Oriel Common-room, did not follow the example 

 which Lord Stanley had set him, but opened our Section with a few remarks of a 

 leather obvious kind. 



Our venerable friend Sir Edward Baines, in 1858, was perhaps also too brief, 

 but he took skilful advantage of the revelations of Mr. Sidney Herbert's commission 

 on the health of our troops, then fresh in the memory of men, to enforce the utility 

 of statistics and to show that arithmetic 'which some thought so heartless, was 

 rising up as the most powerful advocate of the value of human life and health and 

 of all that can purify and elevate society.' He followed up his address, too, by an 

 important paper on the woollen manufactures of England in general and of Leeds, 

 where the meeting took place that year, in particular. 



1858 was, I may observe, rather exceptionally rich in good papers, which was 

 hardly the case with 1859, when we were gathered together at Aberdeen under 

 Colonel Sykes, then Member for that city. 



The address of Mr. Senior at Oxford, in 1860, was a protest against the 

 unscientific character of some of the papers read in our Section during the years 

 that had elapsed since 1856. He explained that he used the word unscientific not 

 dj'slogistically but only distinctively, the tendency he blamed being that to stray 

 across the bounds of science into the realm of art. ' A scieuce,' he said, ' aims 

 only at supplying materials for the memory and judgment. It does not pre-suppose 

 any purpose beyond the acquisition of knowledge. An art is intended to influence 

 the will : it pre-supposes some object to be attained, and it points out the easiest, 



