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recur again and again, at every step, to the test of actual 
experiment, and to make our information (as the prospectus 
of the Society recommends) " minute and local." The 
second object of the Society was Polytechnic ; or, in other 
words, the application of the means provided by art to the 
resources provided by nature, so as best to mould them to the 
uses and support of the great human family. To this head, 
one of the papers announced for that evening, on " The Iron 
Manufacture," would be devoted. The Society's third object 
was to ameliorate the moral and social condition of that large, 
and in a great degree isolated, class, who spend their lives in 
raising, or fitting for their appointed uses, the mineral products 
of our country. The mode in which the Society had prose- 
cuted these objects appeared from the series of their papers, 
several of which he had had the pleasure and advantage 
of reading; and which, he thought, no one who had any 
taste for such studies, could read without admiration of the 
acuteness, research, and enlightened benevolence of the 
writers. There were papers on fossil remains ; on our great 
mineral products, especially the two chief mineral products 
of our district, Coal and Iron ; on the modes of working or 
using them to advantage, such as they would have that even- 
ing on the Iron Manufacture; on some of their principal 
applications in recent times, such as locomotives and their 
various improvements; on the different qualities of soil in 
different Geological Districts, on which class of subjects he 
was glad to see that Society in amicable intercourse with 
another important body, the Yorkshire Agricultural Associa- 
tion ; on the qualities of water, a subject of great interest at 
all times, and at present of peculiar interest in Leeds ; and, 
so far as regarded the workman, on improvements in his 
great protector from fire-damp, the Davy Safety Lamp, and 
on what, if thoroughly accomplished, might prove a still 
better protector to him, the ventilation of mines. These 
