90 Proceedings of the British Association. 



surround those in power with every form of extravagant pretension. 

 And even if this were not so, the number of competing claims, which 

 cannot be all satisfied, can only harass and bewilder, unless there 

 be somewhere seated a discriminating and selecting judgment, which, 

 among many important claims, shall fix upon the most important, 

 and urge them with the weight of well-established character. I know 

 not where such a selecting judgment can be so confidently looked 

 for as in the great scientific bodies of the country, each in its own 

 department, and in this association, constituted, in great measure, 

 out of, and so representing them all, and numbering besides, among 

 its members, abundance of men of excellent science and enlightened 

 minds, who belong to none of them. The constitution of such a 

 body is the guarantee both for the general soundness of its recom- 

 mendations, and for the due weighing of their comparative impor- 

 tance, should ever the claims of different branches of science come 

 into competition with each other. 



In performing this most important office of suggesting channels 

 through which the fertilizing streams of national munificence can be 

 most usefully conveyed over the immense and varied fields of scientific 

 culture, it becomes us, in the first place, to be so fully impressed with 

 a sense of duty to the great cause for which we are assembled, as not 

 to hesitate for an instant in making a recommendation of whose 

 propriety we are satisfied, on the mere ground that the aid required, 

 is of great and even of unusual magnitude. And on the other hand, 

 keeping within certain reasonable limits of total amount, which each 

 individual must estimate for himself, and which it would be unwise, 

 and indeed impossible, to express in terms, it will be at once felt that 

 economy in asking is quite as high a " distributive virtue" as econo- 

 my in granting, and that every pound, recommended unnecessarily, is 

 so much character thrown away. I make these observations because 

 the principles they contain cannot be too frequently impressed, and by 

 no means, because I consider them to have been overstepped in any 

 part of our conduct hitherto. In the next place, it should be borne 

 in mind that, in recommending to Government, not a mere grant of 

 money, but a scientific enterprise or a national establishment, whether 

 temporary or permanent, not only is it our duty so to place it before 

 them, that its grounds of recommendation shall be thoroughly intel- 



