<* REPORT 1873. 



which is of long standing, and which has done much useful work, reports to us 

 annually on the Rainfall of the British Isles. Thus our wide range covers the 

 mathematics of numher and quantity in their most abstract forms, the mathematics 

 of space, of time, of matter, of motion, and of force, the many sciences which we 

 comprehend imder the name of astroncmy, the theories of sound, of light, heat, 

 electricity, and, besides the whole physics of our earth, sea, and atmosphere, the 

 theory of earthquakes, the theory of tides, the theory of all movements of the air, 

 from the lightest ripple that affects the barometer up to a cyclone. As I have 

 abeady said, it is impossible that communications on all these" subjects should be 

 interesting, or indeed intelligible, to all our members ; and notwithstanding the 

 pains taken by the Committee and by the Secretaries to classify the communications 

 offered to us, and to place upon the same days those of which the subjects are 

 cognate to one another, we cannot doubt that the disparateness of the material 

 which conies before us in this Section is a source of serious inconvenience to many 

 members of the Association. Occasionally, too, the pressure upon our time is 

 very great, and we are obliged to hurry over the discussions on communications of 

 great importance, the number of papers submitted to us being, of course, in a direct 

 proportion to the number of the subjects included in our progi-amme. It has again 

 and again been proposed to remedy these admitted evils by dividing the Section, 

 or at least by resolving it into one or more subsections. But I confess that I am 

 one of those who have never regretted that this proposal has not commended 

 Itself to the Association, or indeed to the section itself. I have always felt that 

 by so subdividing ourselves we should run the risk of losing one or two great 

 advantages which we at present possess; and I will briefly state what, in my 

 judgment, these advantages are. 



I do not wish to undervalue the use to a scientific man of listening to and 

 taking part in discussions on subjects which lie whollv in the direction in which 

 his own mmd has been working. But I think, nevertheless, that most men who 

 have attended a Meeting of this Association, if asked what they have chiefly gained 

 by It, would answer, in the first place, that they have had opportunities of forming 

 or of renewing those acquaintances or intimacies with other scientific men which, 

 to niost men engaged in scientific pursuits, are an indispensable condition of suc- 

 cessful work ; and in the second place, that while they may have heard but little 

 relating to their own immediate line of inquiry which they might not as easily have 

 found in journals or transactions elsewhere, they have learned much which might 

 otherwise have never come to their knowledge of what is going on in otlier 

 directions of scientific inquiry, and that they have carried away many new con- 

 ceptions, many fruitful germs of thought, caught perhaps from a discussion turning 

 upon questions apparently very remote from their own pursuits. An object just 

 perceptible on a distant horizon is sometimes better descried by a careless side- 

 ward glance than by straining the sight directly at it ; and so capricious a gift is 

 the inventive faculty of the human mind, that the clue to the mystery hid beneath 

 some complicated system of facts will sometimes elude the most patient and syste- 

 matically conducted search, and yet will reveal itself all of a sudden upon some 

 casual suggestion arising in connexion with an apparently remote subject. I 

 believe that the mixed character and wide range of our discussions has been most 

 favourable to such happy accidents. But even apart from these, if the fusion in 

 this Section of so many various branches of human knowledge tends in some degree 

 to keep before our minds the essential oneness of Science, it does us a good service. 

 There can be no question that the increasing specialization of the sciences, which 

 appears to be inevitable at the present time, does nevertheless constitute one great 

 source of danger for the future progress of human knowledge. This specialization 

 is inevitable, because the further the boundaries of knowledge are extended in any 

 direction, the more laborious and time-absorbing a process does it become to travel 

 to the frontier ; and thus the mind has neither time nor energy to spare for the 

 purpose of acquainting itself with regions that lie far away from the trade over 

 which it IS forced to travel. And yet the disadvantages of excessive specialization 

 are no less evident, because in natural philosophy, as indeed in all things on which 

 the mind of man can be employed, a certain wideness of view is essential to the 

 achievement of any great result, or to the discovery of any thing reallv new. The 



