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Fifteenth Meeting of the British Association for the advancement of 

 Science. Cambridge, l$th June, 1845. 



The members assembled in the Senate House at eight o'clock, and 

 the Dean of Ely, having taken the chair, stated that this meeting 

 of the Association had a distinctive character from all preceding, by- 

 its connexion with the Magnetic Conference, which would include 

 scientific men from all parts of Europe, who had resolved to meet on 

 this occasion, and compare and co-ordinate there observations on 

 magnetic and meteorological phenomena. He named several of the 

 eminent men who had come to take a part in the conference, and 

 alluded feelingly to the absence of Gauss, the great patriarch of 

 magnetic science ; and concluded by observing that the duties of his 

 office were now fulfilled, and he had only to give place to Sir J. 

 Herschel, whom he remembered as a competitor, but not as a rival, 

 and with whom were associated those reminiscences which youth 

 formed in its tenderness, and age hallowed in its memories. 



Sir J. Herschel, who was suffering from a severe cold, on taking 

 the chair, briefly adverted to the eulogy of the Dean of Ely, as 

 characterized by the partiality of youthful friendship, and then, 

 apologizing for his defects of voice, read the following address : — 



The President's Address. 

 Gentlemen, — The terms of kindness in which I have been intro- 

 duced to your notice by my predecessor in the office which you have 

 called on me to fill, have been gratifying to me in no common degree 

 — not as contributing to the excitement of personal vanity (a feeling 

 which the circumstances in which I stand, and the presence of so 

 many individuals every way my superiors, must tend powerfully to 

 chastize), but as the emanation of a friendship begun at this Uni- 

 versity when we were youths together, preparing for our examina- 

 tions for degrees, and contemplating each other, perhaps, with some 

 degree of rivalry (if that can be called rivalry from which every 

 spark of jealous feeling is absent). That friendship has since con- 

 tinued, warm and unshadowed for a single instant by the slightest 

 cloud of disunion, and among all the stirring and deep-seated remem- 

 brances which the sight of these walls, within which we are now 



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