136 
THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS. 
[August 17,1873. 
its duties, of the Society and what I believe to be incum¬ 
bent upon it, but let us bear in mind that Society and 
Conference alike are composed of members, and that no 
individual member of a body corporate is excused from 
his share of work. Let me put it rather in the words of 
Lord Bacon— 
“ I hold every man to be a debtor to his profession ; 
from the which, as men of course do seek to receive 
countenance and profit, so ought they of duty to en¬ 
deavour themselves by way of amends to be a help and 
ornament thereunto.” 
BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCE¬ 
MENT OF SCIENCE. 
The first General Meeting of the members of this 
Association was held in the Royal Pavilion at Brighton 
on Wednesday evening, August 14th. The following 
inaugural address was delivered by the new President, 
Dr. Carpenter, F.R.S.:— 
Address. 
Thirty-six years have now elapsed since at the first 
and (I regret to say) the only meeting of this Associa¬ 
tion held in Bristol,—which ancient city followed imme¬ 
diately upon our national Universities in giving it a 
welcome,—I enjoyed the privilege which I hold°it one 
of the most valuable functions of these annual assem 
blages to bestow , that of coming into j)ersonal relation 
with those distinguished men whose names are to every 
cultivator of science as “household words,” and the 
light of whose brilliant example, and the warmth of 
whose coidial encouiagement are the most precious in¬ 
fluences by which his own aspirations can be fostered 
and directed. Under the Presidency of the Marquis of 
Lansdowne, with Conybeare and Prichard as Vice-Pre¬ 
sidents, with Vernon Harcourt as General Secretary, 
and John Phillips cis Assistant Socrotary, wero fathered 
together Whewell and Peacock, James Forbes* and Sir 
W. Rowan Hamilton, Murchison and Sedgwick, Buck- 
land and Do la Beche, Henslow and Daubeny, Roget, 
Richardson, and Ed ward Forbes, with many others, per¬ 
haps not less distinguished, of whom my own recollection 
is less vivid. 
In his honoured old age, Sedgwick still retains, in the 
academic home of his life, all his pristine interest in 
whatever bears on the advance of the science he has 
adorned as well as enriched; and Phillips still cultivates 
with all his old enthusiasm the congenial soil to which 
he has been transplanted. But the rest,-our fathers 
and elder brothers,-“Where are they ?” It is for us 
of the present generation to show that they live in our 
n cs , o call, or*ard the work which they commenced; 
and to transmit the influence of their example to our 
own successors. 1 
There is on e of these great men, whose departure 
anTwZsefifr met clai ™ a specialnotice, 
and whose life—full as it was of years and honours—we 
should have all desired to see prolonged for a few 
mXrmo C0U F “ S fee “ en “? ^ been ^tended with 
Stb Mnn.J ip W ° u° u J r al then have sympathized 
with Murchison, in the delight with which he would 
have received the intelligence of the safety of the friend 
in whose scientific labours and personal Welfare he felt 
to the last the keenest interest. That this intelligence 
which our own expedition for the relief of Livingstone 
wmuld have obtained (we will hope) a few months’later, 
s lou d have been brought to us through the generosity 
necrdhLrl 11 ^"^^ 16 .®T^ erpri3 ^ n8 ’ nhiiity may I not use our 
peculiarly English word, the “pluck”—of another of 
oui American brethren, cannot but be a matter of na¬ 
tional regret to us. But let us bury that regrot in the 
common joy which both nations feel in the result • and 
while we give a cordial welcome to Mr. Stanley, let us 
glory in the prospect now opening, that England and 
America will co-operate in that noble object wdiich— 
far more than the discovery of the sources of the Nile— 
our great traveller has set before himself as his true 
mission—the extinction of the slave trade. 
At the last meeting of this Association, I had the 
pleasure of being able to announce that I had received 
from the First Lord of the Admiralty a favourable reply 
to a representation I had ventured to make to him, as to 
the importance of prosecuting on a more extended scale 
the course of inquiry into the physical and biological 
conditions of the Deep Sea, on which, with my col¬ 
leagues Prof. Wyville Thomson and Mr. J. Gwyn 
Jeffreys, I had been engaged for the three preceding 
years. That for which I had asked was a circumnavi¬ 
gating expedition of at least three years’ duration, pro¬ 
vided vfith an adequate scientific staff, and with the 
most complete equipment that our experience could de¬ 
vise. The Council of the Royal Society having been 
led by the encouraging tenour of the answer I had re¬ 
ceived, to make a formal application to this effect, the 
liberal arrangements of the Government have been car¬ 
ried out under the advice of a scientific committee, w r hich 
included representatives of this Association. Her Ma¬ 
jesty’s ship ‘ Challenger,’ a vessel in everyway suitable for 
the purpose, is now being fitted out at Sheerness; th& 
command of the expedition is entrusted to Captain 
Nares, an officer of w T hose high qualifications I have 
myself the fullest assurance ; while the scientific charge 
of it will be taken by my excellent friend Prof. Wyville 
Thomson, at whose suggestion it was that these investi¬ 
gations were originally commenced, and whose zeal for 
the efficient prosecution of them is shown by his relin¬ 
quishment for a time of the important academic position, 
he at present fills. It is anticipated that the expedition 
will sail in November next; and I feel sure that the 
good wishes of all of you go along with it. 
The confident anticipation expressed by my predeces¬ 
sor, that for the utilization of the total eclipse of the 
sun then impending, our Government would “ exercise 
the same wise liberality as heretofore in the interests of 
science,” has been amply fulfilled. An eclipse-expedi¬ 
tion to India was organized at the charge of the Home- 
Government, and placed under the direction of Mr. 
Lockyer; the Indian Government contributed its quota 
to the work; and a most valuable body of results was 
obtained, of which, with those of the previous year, a 
report is now being prepared under the direction of the 
Council of the Astronomical Society. 
It has been customary with successive occupants of' 
this chair, distinguished as leaders in their several divi¬ 
sions of the noble army of science, to open the proceed¬ 
ings of the meetings over which they respectively pre¬ 
sided, with a discourse on some aspect of nature in her 
relation to man. But I am not aware that any one of 
them has taken up the other side of the inquiry,—that 
which concerns man as the “ interpreter of natureand 
I have therefore thought it not inappropriate to lead you 
to the consideration of the mental processes, by which 
are formed those fundamental conceptions of matter and 
force, of cause and effect, of law and order, which fur¬ 
nish the basis of all scientific reasoning, and constitute 
the Philosophici prima of Bacon. There is a great deal 
of what I cannot but regard as fallacious and misleading, 
philosophy—■“ oppositions of science falsely so called ” 
—’abroad in the world at the present time. And I hope 
to satisfy you, that those who set up their own concep¬ 
tions of the orderly sequence which they discern in the 
phenomena of nature, as fixed and determinate laws r 
by which those phenomena not only are within all 
human experience, but always have been , and always 
must be, invaluably governed, are really guilty of the 
intellectual arrogance they condemn in the systems of 
the ancients, and place themselves in diametrical an¬ 
tagonism to those real philosophers, by whose compre¬ 
hensive grasp and penetrating insight that order has 
