XXX. THIRD REPORT 1833. 



year by year, come to their philosophical Olympia, to witness 

 a noble ceremonial, to meet in a pacific combat, and share in the 

 glorious privilege of pushing on the triumphal car of Truth. 



" The last duty I have to perform this morning would be a 

 painful one indeed, were our Assembly to be broken up into 

 elements which were not again to be reunited. The Association 

 is not, however, dissolved ; its meeting is only adjourned to an- 

 other year; and it has been a matter of great joy to me to an- 

 nounce to you, that the Committee has elected for your next 

 President a distinguished soldier and philosopher ; and that it 

 will be your privilege to reassemble in one of the fairest capitals 

 of the world, — in a city v/hich has nursed a race of literary and 

 philosophic giants, — ^^in a land filled with natural beauties, and 

 wedded to the imagination and the memory by a thousand en- 

 dearing associations. 



" There is a solemnity in parting words, which may, I think, 

 justify me (especially after what has been so well said this morn- 

 ing by the Marquis of Nortliampton,) in passing the limits I 

 have so far carefully prescribed to myself, and in treading for a 

 moment on more hallowed ground. In the first place, I would 

 entreat you to remember that you ought above all things to re- 

 joice in the moral influence of an Association like the present. 

 Facts, which are the first objects of our pursuit, are of compa- 

 ratively small value till they are combined together so as to 

 lead to some philosophic inference. Physical experiments, con- 

 sidered merely by themselves, and apart from the rest of nature, 

 are no better than stones lying scattered on the ground, which 

 require to be chiselled and cemented before they can be made 

 into a building fit for the habitation of man. The true value 

 of an experiment is, that it is subordinate to some law, — that it 

 is a step toward the knowledge of some general truth. Without, 

 at least, a glinnnering of such truth, physical knowledge has no 

 true nobility. But there is in the intellect of man an appetency 

 for the discovery of general truth, and by this appetency, in 

 subordination to the capacities of his mind, has he been led on to 

 the discovery of general laws ; and thus has his soul been fitted 

 to reflect back upon the world a portion of the counsels of his 

 Creator. If I have said that physical phsenomena, unless con- 

 nected with the ideas of order and of law, are of little worth, 

 I may further say, that an intellectual grasp of material laws of 

 the highest oi'der has no moral worth, except it be combined 

 with another movement of the mind, raising it to the perception 

 of an intelligent First Cause. It is by help of this last movement 

 that nature's language is comprehended ; that her laws become 

 pregnant with meaning ; that material phaenomena are instinct 

 with life ; that all moral and material changes become linked 



