78 Literary and PJiilosophical Society. 



all of its mechanics. Enough for a Society if it had done 

 nothing else. 



' The child is father of the man/ a familiar quotation 

 illustrated by knowing that the first paper is connected 

 with the honours which have been brought to our Society 

 in its later years ; and as Dalton made the first remarkable 

 discoveries capable of making chemistry a science, so we 

 find his great theories connected in an unforeseen manner 

 by Joule, giving us the mechanical and chemical equivalent 

 of heat, as a circle of completeness to the chief v/ork of 

 this our first century of existence. 



ADDRESS TO THE SOCIETY BY THOMAS HENRY, F.R.S.^ 



Among the first members of the Society was Thomas 

 Henry, one of the Secretaries, already made a Fellow of the 

 Royal Society ; he shows to our mind the firmest hand in 

 guiding the Institution, after it was begun, and the clearest 

 view of the methods of research. He begins with an essay 

 which one would think to be scarcely needed among such 

 men as constituted the meetings, although it was of a kind 

 not uncommon in these early days ; it is ' On the Advan- 

 tages of Literature and Philosophy in general,' but it is a 

 fitting address to a new society from one of its principal 

 officers. . Such essays were interesting to the Society, 

 even when they only fluttered around truth without seeing 

 much of it. But in him we have no merely sentimental 

 love of science, literature, or philosophy, although such a 

 love we by no means object to. The essay was written with 

 a clear desire to draw the minds of the commercial class 

 to the consideration of studies which might at first appear 



' Science and Taste, vol. i. p. 7. 



