6 REPORT — 1895. 



it places the members of the local societies engaged in scientific work 

 in relation with each other, and brings them into co-operation -with 

 members of the Association and with others engaged in oiiginal in^■esti- 

 gations, and the papers whicli the individual societies publish annually 

 are catalogued in our Report. Thus by degrees a national catalogue 

 will be formed of the scientific work of these societies. 



The Association has, moreover, shown that its scope is coterminous 

 with the British Empire by holding one of its annual meetings at Montreal, 

 and we are likely soon to hold a meeting in Toronto. 



Condition of certain Sciences at the formation of the 

 British Association. 



The Association, at its first meeting, began its work by initiating a 

 series of reports upon the then condition of the several sciences. 



A rapid glance at some of these reports will not only show the enor- 

 mous strides which have been made since 1831 in the investigation of 

 facts to elucidate the laws of Nature, but it may afford a slight insight 

 into the impediments ofiei'ed to the progress of investigation by the 

 mental condition of the community, which had been for so long satisfied 

 to accept assumptions without undergoing the labour of testing their 

 truth by ascertaining the real facts. This habit of mind may be illustrated 

 by two instances selected from the early reports made to the Associa- 

 tion. The first is afforded by the report made in 1832, by Mr. Lubbock, 

 on ' Tides.' 



This was a subject necessarily of importance to England as a dominant 

 power at sea. But in England records of the tides had only recently been 

 commenced at the dockyards of Woolwich, Sheerness, Portsmouth, and 

 Plymouth, on the request of the Royal Society, and no information had 

 been collected upon the tides on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland. 



The British Association may feel pride in the fact that within three 

 years of its inception, viz. by 1834, it had induced the Corporation of 

 Liverpool to establish two tide gauges, and the Government to undertake 

 tidal observations at 500 stations on the coasts of Britain. 



Another cognate instance is exemplified by a paper read at the second 

 meeting, in 1832, upon the State of Naval Architecture in Great Britain. 

 The author contrasts the extreme perfection of the carpentry of the internal 

 fittings of the vessels with the I'emarkable deficiency of mathematical 

 theory in the adjustment of the external form of vessels, and suggests 

 the benefit of the application of refined analysis to the various practical 

 problems which ought to interest shipbuilders— problems of capacity, of 

 displacement, of stowage, of velocity, of pitching and rolling, of masting, 

 of the effects of sails and of the resistance of fluids ; and, moreover, sug- 

 gests that large-scale experiments should be made by Government, to 

 afford the necessary data for calculation. 



Indeed, when we consider how completely the whole habit of mind of 

 the populations of the Western world has been changed, since the beginning 



