BRITISH ASSOCIATION.—THE PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. 69 
pleteness 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 im 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 tu 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 onee 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 ‘the latest attempts, the Association has from its 
very beginning kept in view that its main sphere of usefulness lay in that eoncen- 
trated attention to all scientific operations which a general gives to the move- 
ments of his army, watching and regulating the progress of his impetuous sol- 
diers 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 po- 
sition 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 la- 
bourers 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 re- 
move those impediments 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 directions. 
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 Com mittee of the Association 
entrnsts 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 desirable to the different sec- 
tions to have special reports elaborated; in such cases the General Committee, 
in its capacity of the representative assembly of all the sciences, reserves to itself 
the right of judging what may be of sufficient importance to be thus recorded. 
The special subjects which the Association points out for investigation, in order 
to supply the gaps which it may have observed, are—either such as the philoso- 
pher alone can successfully investigate, because they require the close attention 
of a practised observer, and a thorough knowledge of the particular subject; or 
