204 
MAGAZINE OF SCIENCE AND AET. 
THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE 
BKITISH ASSOCIATION. 
Dublin', August, 1857. 
It is customary at the annual meetings of 
this distinguished hody for the President 
elect to deliver an inaugural _ speech, in 
which he gives a rapid review of the 
progress made in the various departments 
of Science during the year that lias 
elapsed since the last meeting. This 
review serves to mauk out the boun¬ 
daries which the several Sciences have 
reached, and is generally an extremely 
interesting document. The President elect 
for the year 1857 was the Kev. Humphrey 
Lloyd, D. D. The following highly in¬ 
structive address was delivered by him 
to inaugurate the proceedings : 
Gentlemen of the British Association,—Before I 
proceed to tho task which devolves upon mo this 
evening, in virtue of tho position in which your kind¬ 
ness has placed me, suffer mo first to thank you for 
the high honor you have conferred. But, highly as I 
esteemed the distinction, it was not without hesitation 
that I accepted it; for no one can feel more strongly 
than I do myself how unfit I am for some of the duties 
connected vvith it, or how much more adequately they 
might have been performed bv others. But 1 know, 
ut tho samo time, that it has boon tho desire of your 
Council, when practicable, to select your President 
from among those local members who had served in 
tho ranks of the Association, and had shared in its 
labours; and with such knowledge and _ the conscious¬ 
ness that I had at least that humble claim, X telt that 
I had no light to dispute your choice. I do not know 
whether I may veutnro to interpret further your mo¬ 
tives, and to assign another reason for your selection. 
Twenty-two years have elapsed since you visited this 
city s upon that occasion my nearest relative presidod, 
anil I myself had the honor of serving as one of your 
local secretaries. Many concurring circumstances con¬ 
tributed to make that meeting an agreeable one; and 
if vour Council las thought fit, on this occasion, to 
associate the present with the • memories of the past, 
the motive is, at least, a pardonable one. Gentlemen, 
this is to men. solemn occasion: two-and-twenty years 
IQ1S 13 VO LUG RU1UUL1L UtiLOMUUs j - -- 
are no inconsiderable portion even of tho longest life, 
and that man's moral nature is not to he envied who 
can contemplate the distant past, thus vividly recalled, 
without emotion! These two decades have brought 
with them their own largo measure of change. The 
body in which we are associated has grown up from 
youth to maturity; many of its honored names are now- 
now sought for only in the imperishable records of 
their toils; tho institutions which welcomed it here on 
its former visit to tliis city have all received the im¬ 
press of the changing times; and yet, amid all this 
change, we meet once moro in the same city, in the 
same room, to enter again on the same labours. Our 
assemblage is now, as it was before, dignified by the 
presence of the Representative of Majesty; and I see 
around me, associated for this task, many of those who 
shared it before—the men whose sagacity first per¬ 
ceived the want of such a society as tliis, whose energy 
supplied it, and wheso wisdom directed its steps while 
it had need of guidance. I trust I may ho forgiven for 
dwelling thus far on the peculiar circumstances under 
which we are here assembled; and I now hasten to 
discharge tho task which the usages of this chair im¬ 
pose upon me, and proceed to lay before you, as well 
as I am able, a brfef sketch of the recent progress of 
some of those sciences to whose advancement we arc 
pledged bv oar Institution. In doing so, I gladly fol¬ 
low the practice which has of late become the rule— 
namely, that your President for each year should 
bring under your notice, chiefly, tho recent addition 
to those departments of science with which he happen 3 
to he himself most familiar. It is plainly fitting tbas 
he who addresses yon should speak, as tar as ho cant 
from his own acquired knowledge. Partial views arc 
better than inexact ones; and provision is made foe 
their completion in the annual change of your officer. 
In tho present instance I derive tho full advantage of 
this arrangement—inasmnch as tho subjects upon 
which 1 could not thus speak have been, most of 
them, ably treated by my predecessor in this chair. 
To commence, then, with Astronomy .-—The career of 
planetary discover;-, which began in the first years of 
the present century, and was resumed in 1845, lias 
since continued with unabated ardour; bat since 1816 
not a single year has passed without some one or more 
additions 0 to the number of the planetoids; and in one 
year alone (1852), no fewer than eight such bodies were 
discovered. Tho last year has furnished its quota of 
five, and in the present three more have been found, one 
by Mr. Pogson, of Oxford, and the other two by M. 
Goldschmidt, of Paris. Tho known number of these 
bodies is now forty-five; their total mass, however, is 
very small; the diameter of tho largest is less than 
forty miles, while that of tho smallest (Atalanta)is 
little more than four. These discoveries have been 
facilitated by star-maps and star-catalogues, the for¬ 
mation of which they have, on the other hand, stimn a 
lated. Two very extensive works of this kind are now 
in progress—the Star-Catalogue of M- Chacornac, mad- 
at the°Observatory of Marseilles, in the course of pub. 
lication by tho French Government; and that of Mr. 
Cooper, made at his observatory- at Markreo, in Ireland, 
w-hich is now being published by the help of the Par¬ 
liamentary Grant of the Royal Society. It is a remark¬ 
able result of tho latter labour, that no fewer than 
seventy-seven stars, previously catalogued, are now 
missing. This, no doubt, is to be ascribed in part to 
the errors of former observations; but it seems rea¬ 
sonable to snppose that, to some oxtent at least, it is the 
result of changes actually in progress in the Sidereal 
Svstem. Tho sudden appearance of a new fixed star in 
tlio heavens, its subsequent chango ot lustre, and its 
final disappearance, are phenomena winch have at all 
times attracted tho attention of astronomers. _ About 
twenty such have been observed. Arago has given the 
history of the most remarkable, and discussed the 
various hypotheses which have been offered for their 
explanation. Of these tho most plausible is that which 
attributes the phenomenon to unequal brightness of the 
faces of the star which are presented successively to 
the earth by the star's rotation round its axis. On this 
hypothesis"tl a appearance should he periodic. .M. 
Goldschmidt has recently given support to this expla¬ 
nation, by rendering it probable that the new star of 
IC09 it the same whose appearance is recorded in tho 
•vears 393, 798, and 1203. Its period, in such case, is 
405J years. The greater part of tho celestial phenomena 
ale comprised in the movements of the heavenly bodies 
and the configurations depending on them; and they 
are for the most part reducible to the same law of gra¬ 
vity which governs the planetary motions. But there 
ore appearances which indicate the operation of other 
forces, and which therefore demand the attention of the 
physicist—although, from their nature, they must pro¬ 
bably long remain subjects of speculation. Of these, 
tho spiriform nebulae, discovered by Lord Rossc, have 
been already referred to from tills chair, as indicating 
changes in tlae more distant regions of the universe, to 
widen there is nothing entirely analogous in our own 
svstem. These appearances are accounted for by an 
able anonymous writer, by the action of gravitating 
forces combined with the effects of a resisting medium, 
