General View of the Society. 5 



spot, taught by the children of the place, which children 

 are more powerful teachers than the wisest men or tenderest 

 mothers, and so we have a burr in one place and aspirated 

 vowels in another. Thus too, Manchester has in its modes of 

 thinking grown by concretions so constant and regular that 

 it resembles more the great crystal produced in a mass of 

 incongruous matter ; simply because there was in solution 

 sufficient of its own kind to prefer the original shape of the 

 small accidental parent crystal, and to leave all the incon- 

 gruity behind it whilst it grew in size and in precision of 

 character more fully than the germ crystal itself, which 

 however still kept leading the type. In following out 

 the comparison we may wonder, exactly as young and even 

 old chemists do, how much of the incongruous matter there 

 really was to the small amount crystallised, so we must 

 wonder how few in a great city cared for the Society, how 

 many were suited for the peculiar trade and commerce of 

 the place, how many business men were to be found in it, 

 whilst few of them in a whole century have cared for science 

 by itself No society has been more entirely dependent 

 on the men who at the time formed its attending members. 

 Whilst out of a great community these members must be 

 considered few, of these few those who have attended have 

 been, as is always the case, fewer ; and of these again the 

 active have been only a small part ; but not the less there 

 has been a law in the recesses of humanity which has caused 

 the influence of the community to concentrate itself, first 

 into the Society, and then through particular members, into 

 the theory of chemistry, equivalents of atoms and their 

 connection with mechanical force, the knowledge of which 

 must influence mankind for ever. 



