deeply impressed; he recurs to it continually, and repeats it in 
various forms in every part of his philosophical works—the prin- 
ciple, namely, that the greatest progress of human knowledge must 
be looked for from the association of men engaged in the investi- 
gation of different and seemingly unconnected branches of study, 
bringing together as into a common stock or storehouse, and com- 
municating freely to each other, the results of their various labours. 
It has therefore always appeared to mea proof of singular wisdom 
and foresight in the eminent men to whom we owe the foundation 
of this Academy, that they did not confine its labours to any ene 
branch of science, but divided it into departments, to comprehend, 
as far as possible, the whole range of human learning. Can any one 
doubt that if this Academy had been in its original constitution an 
Academy of Science only, or a Society of Antiquaries only, it must 
long ago have met the fate of the older Society founded by Arch- 
bishop Marsh when he was Provost of Trinity College, in imita- 
tion of the Royal Society, or of that still older Society, over which 
Molyneaux presided, founded on the same model, at the close of the 
seventeenth century ?* The number of literary men, devoted to any 
one pursuit in this country, was at that time too small for the effi- 
cient support of any Society standing on the basis of Science alone, 
or of Archeology alone, or Classical studies alone. For this reason, 
therefore, were there no other, it is manifest, that this Academy 
must long since have ceased to exist, but for the wise constitution 
it received from its founders, embodying the great principle of 
Bacon’s philosophy to which I have already alluded, and asso- 
ciating in one common cause the cultivators of the severer sciences, 
with the student of languages, the classical scholar, the historian, 
the archeologist. 
And that this favourite principle of Bacon was in the contem- 
plation of our founders, appears the more probable from this, that 
the three Committees into which they divided the Academy seem to 
have been suggested by the threefold division of human knowledge 
adopted by the illustrious restorer of learning, and derived from the 
ancient division of the intellectual faculties of man,—Memory, 
* See Preface to vol. 1. of Transactions, Royal Irish Academy. 
Ds 
