ADDRESS. 1XV 



tion for its success is: accurate observation and collection of facts in such 

 comprehensiveness and completeness as to furnish the philosopher with the 

 necessary material from which to draw safe conclusions. 



Science is not of yesterday. We stand on the shoulders of past ages, and 

 the amount of observations made, and facts ascertained, has been transmitted 

 to us and carefully preserved in the various storehouses of science; other 

 crops have been reaped, but still lie scattered on the field ; many a rich 

 harvest is ripe for cutting, but waits for the reaper. Economy of labour is 

 the essence of good husbandry, and no less so in the field of science. Our 

 Association has felt the importance of this truth, and may well claim, as one 

 of its principal merits, the constant endeavour to secure that economy. 



One of the latest undertakings of the Association has been, in conjunction 

 with the Royal Society, to attempt the compilation of a classified catalogue 

 of scientific memoirs, which, by combining under one head the titles of all 

 memoirs written on a certain subject, will, when completed, enable the 

 student who wishes to gain information on that subject to do so with the 

 greatest ease. It gives him, as it were, the plan of the house, and the key 

 to the different apartments in which the treasures relating to his subject are 

 stored, saving him at once a painful and laborious search, and affording him 

 at the same time an assurance that what is here offered contains the whole 

 of the treasures yet acquired. 



While this has been one of its latest attempts, the Association has from 

 its very beginning kept in view that its main sphere of usefulness lay in that 

 concentrated attention to all scientific operations which a general gives to 

 the movements of his army, watching and regulating the progress of his im- 

 petuous soldiers in the different directions to which their ardour may have 

 led them, carefully noting the gaps which may arise from their independent 

 and eccentric action, and attentively observing what impediments may have 

 stopped, or may threaten to stop, the progress of certain columns. 



Thus it attempts to fix and record the position and progress of the different 

 labours, by its Reports on the state of Sciences published annually in its 

 Transactions; — thus it directs the attention of the labourers to those gaps 

 which require to be filled up, if the progress is to be a safe and steady one ; 

 — thus it comes forward with a helping hand in striving to remove those im- 

 pediments which the unaided efforts of the individual labourer have been or 

 may be unable to overcome. 



Let us follow the activity of the Association in these three different direc- 

 tions. 



The Reports on the state of Science originate in the conviction of the 

 necessity for fixing, at given intervals, with accuracy and completeness, the 

 position at which it has arrived. For this object the General Committee of 

 the Association entrusts to distinguished individuals in the different branches 

 of Science the charge of becoming, as it were, the biographers of the period. 

 There are special points in different Sciences in which it sometimes appears 



1859. e 



