ADDBESS. liii 
have also glasses and means to see minute bodies perfectly and distinctly, 
as the shapes and colours of small flies and worms, which cannot otherwise be 
seen ;” also “ observations on blood and sap not otherwise to be seen.” 
In regard to natural history, Bacon imagines huge Aquaria, of both salt 
and fresh water, for the use and observation and generation of fish and fowl, 
“‘ where we make trials upon fishes. We have also parks and enclosures of 
all sorts of beasts and birds, which we use not only for view and rareness, but 
likewise for dissections and trials ; that thereby we may take light what may 
be wrought upon the body of man, 
“* We have also large and various orchards and gardens, wherein we do not 
so much respect beauty as variety of ground and soil: in these are practised 
all conclusions of grafting and inoculating; and we make, by art, trees and 
flowers to come up earlier or later than their seasons ; we also make them 
by art much greater than their nature, and their fruit greater and sweeter, 
and of different taste, smell, and colour.” 
Lastly, as one important means of effecting the great aims of the “six days- 
college,” certain of its members were deputed, as “ merchants of light,” to 
make “ circuits or visits of divers principal cities of the kingdom.” 
This latter feature of the Baconian organisation is the chief characteristic 
of the “ British Association ;” but we have striven to carry out other aims 
of the ‘New Atlantis,’ such as the systematic summaries of the results of 
different branches of science, of which our published volumes of ¢ Reports’ 
are evidence ; and we have likewise realized, in some measure, the idea of 
the ‘ Mathematical House’ in our establishment at Kew. 
The national and private Observatories, the Royal and other Scientific 
Societies, the British Museum, the Zoological, Botanical, and Horticultural 
Gardens combine in our day to realize that which Bacon foresaw in distant 
perspective. Great beyond all anticipation have been the results of this organi- 
sation, and of the application of the inductive methods of interrogating Nature. 
The universal law of gravitation, the circulation of the blood, the analo- 
gous course of the magnetic influence, which may be said to vivify the earth, 
permitting no atom of its most solid constituents to stagnate in total rest ; 
the development and progress of Chemistry, Geology, Palontology; the 
inventions and practical applications of gas, the steam-engine, photography, 
telegraphy :—such, in the few centuries since Bacon wrote, have been the 
rewards of the faithful followers of his rules of research. 
We can hardly appreciate the swift of progress of human knowledge unless 
we go back, for an instant, to the period whice I have chosen as the starting- 
point in this survey. 
Bacon’s treatment of the Copernican theory shows the importance of pure 
observation in the establishment of natural truth, and places in a strong light 
the incompetency of the highest intellectual power, of itself, to reason up to 
truth, even when it is so plain as it now appears to us in reference to the 
true nature of the apparent movements of the sun in respect to the earth. 
The well-known passages from the ‘ Thema Celi,’ and the essay ‘On the 
