42 REPORT—1858. 
science whom I gee around me, would not be more competent to fill with credit to 
himself and satisfaction to the Section. However, in this respect, I must throw my- 
self on your indulgence. If there be any conventional usages in the conduct of the 
business of the Section, which have grown up as matters of habitual arrangement, 
and been ascertained by experience to facilitate its working, with which I am un- 
acquainted, there are those around me who will good-naturedly set me right. 
But there is one deficiency which I feel very much :—it is the want of that thorough 
acquaintance, that sort of coup d’cil extending over the whole area of the vast field 
of chemical, mineralogical, and agricultural research which the objects of this Section 
embrace, which would justify me in the ambitious hope that I could command your 
attention as I am aware that my predecessors in this Chair have done on some former 
occasions, while placing before you a summary of the progress made since our last: 
meeting, in these branches of knowledge, and delineating the leading features of their 
present, and the prospects of their future state. In this I should be sure to fail, and 
therefore [ shall not attempt it, though I cannot help giving expression to my surprise 
and admiration of the astonishing developments which they have undergone, I will 
not say since the time when my own acquaintance with chemistry commenced by 
hanging in rapt enthusiasm over Macquer’s Dictionary (which seemed to me in those 
early days a work of little short of superhuman intelligence); nor since the epoch 
when a Davy electrified the world by the decomposition of the alkalies ; nor that when 
a Faraday commenced his magnificent career of discovery ; nor when a Berzelius first 
showed what might be done in giving precision to analysis—but since organic che- 
mistry has assumed, by the experiments and reasonings of Dumas, Liebig, Hofmann, 
and its other distinguished cultivators, that highly abstract and intellectual form, under 
which it now presents itself, and which, by the links of the platina bases, and com- 
pounds such as those described by Gibbs and Genth under the name of the ammonio- 
cobaltic bases, and by those which are every day coming into view by the mutual in- 
terweaving, if I may use such an expression, of the organic and inorganic systems of 
composition in bases such as those of the metallic ethyls and those of boron and silicon 
—seems to place these conceptions in much the same sort of relation to the ordinary 
atomic theory as put forth by Dalton and Higgins, and the elementary notions of 
oxide, acid, and base of Lavoisier, that the transcendental analysis holds to common 
algebra. 
And here perhaps I may be tolerated if I put in a word of reclamation against 
the system of notation into which chemists, who are not always algebraists, have 
fallen in expressing their atomic formule. These formule have been gradually 
taking on a character more and more repulsive to the algebraical eye. There is a 
principle which I think ought to be borne in mind in framing the conventional nota- 
tions as well as nomenclatures of every science, at every new step in its progress, viz. 
that as sciences do not stand alone, but exist in mutual relation to each other,—as it 
is for their common interest that there should exist among them a system of free 
communication on their frontier points,—the language they use and the signs they 
employ should be framed in such a way as at least not to contradict each other. As 
the atomic formule used by the chemist are not merely symbolic of the mode in 
which atoms are grouped, but are intended also to express numerical relations in- 
dicative of the aggregate weights of the several atoms in each group and the several 
groups in each compound, it is distressing to the algebraist to find that he cannot in- 
terpret a chemical formula (I mean in its numerical application) according to the 
received rules of arithmetical computation, 
In a paper which I published a long time ago on the Hyposulphites, I was parti- 
cularly careful to use a mode of notation which, while perfectly clear in its chemical 
sense, and fully expressing the relations of the groupings I allude to, accommodated 
itself at the same time perfectly well to numerical computation, no symbol being in 
any case juxtaposed, or in any way intercombined with another, so as to violate 
the strict algebraical meaning of the formula. This system seemed for a while likely 
to be generally adopted ; but it has been more and more departed from, and I think 
with a manifest corresponding departure from intelligibility. ‘The time is perhaps 
not so very far distant, when, from a knowledge of the family to which a chemical 
element belongs, and its order in that family, we may be able to predict with con- 
fidence the system of groups into which it is capable of entering, and the part it will — 
