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Extracts from Resolutions of the General Committee.

Committees and individuals, to whom grants of money for scientific purposes have been entrusted, are required to present to each following meeting of the Association a Report of the progress which has been made; with a statement of the sums which have been expended, and the balance which remains disposable on each grant.

Grants of pecuniary aid for scientific purposes from the funds of the Association expire at the ensuing meeting, unless it shall appear by a Report that the Recommendations have been acted on, or a continuation of them be ordered by the General Committee.

In each Committee, the Member first named is the person entitled to call on the Treasurer, William Spottiswoode, Esq., 19 Chester Street, Belgrave Square, London, S.W., for such portion of the sum granted as may from time to time be required.

In grants of money to Committees, the Association does not contemplate the payment of personal expenses to the members.

In all cases where additional grants of money are made for the continuation of Researches at the cost of the Association, the sum named shall be deemed to include, as a part of the amount, the specified balance which may remain unpaid on the former grant for the same object.

1862.

d

General Meetings.

On Wednesday Evening, October 1, at 8 P.M., in the New Assembly Room, Guildhall, William Fairbairn, Esq., F.R.S., resigned the office of President to the Rev. R. Willis, M.A., F.R.S., who took the Chair, and delivered an Address, for which see page li.

On Thursday Evening, October 2, at 8 P.M., in the New Assembly Room, Guildhall, Professor Tyndall, F.R.S., delivered a Discourse on the Forms and Action of Water.

On Friday Evening, October 3, at 8 P.M., a Soirée, with Experiments, took place in the New Assembly Rooms.

On Monday Evening, October 5, at 8 P.M., Dr. Odling, F.R.S., delivered a Discourse on Organic Chemistry.

On Tuesday Evening, October 6, at 8 P.M., a Soirée, with Microscopes, took place in the New Assembly Rooms.

On Wednesday, October 7, at 3 P.M., the concluding General Meeting took place, when the Proceedings of the General Committee, and the Grants of Money for Scientific purposes, were explained to the Members.

The Meeting was then adjourned to Newcastle-on-Tyne*.

* The Meeting is appointed to take place on Wednesday, August 26, 1863.

ADDRESS

BY

THE REV. R. WILLIS, M.A., F.R.S.,
Jacksonian Professor, &c.

GENTLEMEN OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION,-I have the honour to announce to you that we are now opening the Thirty-second Meeting of the British Association, and are for the third time assembled in this University.

At its first coming hither in 1833 its organization was scarce completed, its first Meeting having been devoted to explanations, discussions, and allotment of work to willing labourers; its second Meeting, to the reception of the first instalment of those admirable preliminary Reports which served as the foundation of its future labours, and to the division of scientific communications to the Sectional Committees.

But it was at Cambridge that the original plan of the Association bore fruit, by the receipt of the first paper which contained the results of experiments instituted expressly at the request of the Association. The success of the Association was now confirmed by the number of compositions and annual subscriptions paid in, and by the help of these funds a most important measure was introduced, namely, the practice of granting, in aid of philosophical researches to be undertaken by individuals or committees at the request of the Association, sums of money to meet the outlay required for apparatus or other expenses, which could not be asked from persons who were otherwise willing to devote their time to the advancement of science. It was at Cambridge that the importance and authority of the Association had become so manifest, that the first of its applications for Government assistance towards scientific objects was immediately complied with by a grant of £500 to reduce the Greenwich Observations of Bradley and Maskelyne. At the third Meeting improvements were made in the distribution of the Sciences to the Sections, and a Section of Statistics added. The only change in this respect that was subsequently found necessary was the establishment of a separate Section for Mechanical Science applied to the Arts, in 1837. The employment of alphabetical letters to distinguish the Sections had been introduced in 1835.

I have said enough to claim for the Cambridge Meeting the honour of completing the development of the Association; and I may be permitted to quote from our fourth Report the gratifying assurance, that so obvious was the utility of the proposed undertaking, that, in its very infancy, there were found. several distinguished individuals, chiefly from the University of Cambridge, who volunteered to undertake some of the most valuable of those Reports which appeared in the first volume of the Proceedings.

With a mixture of regret and shame I confess, that although my name is enrolled in the honourable list of those who undertook Reports, it will be

I

sought in vain amongst those who promptly performed their promises. Yet may be permitted to say that I still hope to be enabled at some future time to complete the Report on Acoustics, of which I delivered merely an oral sketch at the second Meeting of the Association, in 1832.

The Association quitted Cambridge to pursue, with its matured organization, and with continually increasing stability and influence, the career of brilliant and useful labours in every branch of Science that it has never ceased to run during the two-and-thirty years that have elapsed since its foundation. It revisited Cambridge after an interval of twelve years, in 1845; and now, after a lapse of seventeen years, we have the high gratification of welcoming once more the Association to this scene of its early meetings.

This appears a fitting occasion for a concise review of the leading principles and prominent labours of the body.

Scientific Societies, as usually constituted, receive and publish papers which are offered to them by individuals, but do not profess to suggest subjects for them, or to direct modes of investigation, except in some cases by offering prizes for the best Essay in some given branch.

This Association, on the contrary, is not intended to receive and record individual originality. Its motto is, SUGGESTION AND COOPERATION, and its purpose is thus to advance science by cooperation, in determinate lines of direction laid down by suggestion.

To give form and authority to this principle, the admirable conception of suggestive Reports was in the first place developed; a collection that should constitute a general survey of the Sciences as they stood at the foundation of the Association, each branch reported by some member who had already shown his devotion to the cultivation of it by his own contribution to its advancement, and each Report passing in review its appointed subject, not for the purpose of teaching it, but of drawing forth the obscure and weak places of our knowledge of it, and thus to lay down the determinate lines of direction for new experimental or mathematical researches, which it was the object of the Association to obtain.

The requests for these Reports were zealously responded to, and so rapidly that at the second Meeting ten were received, and at the third eight others. In this manner in five or six years the cycle of the Sciences was well nigh exhausted; but the series of such Reports has been maintained in succeeding years, even to the present time, by the necessity of supplemental Reports, to point out not merely the advances of each science already treated, but the new lines of direction for inquiry that develope themselves at every step in advance.

The Reports thus described were entitled "On the progress and desiderata of the respective branch of Science," or "On the state of our knowledge respecting such Science," and must be considered as merely preparations for the great work for which the Association was formed. They constitute the suggestive part of the scheme: the cooperative mechanism by which each new line of research recommended in the Reports was to be explored, was energetically set in motion by the annual appointment of Committees or individuals to whom these especial investigations were respectively assigned, with adequate sums at their disposal.

These Committees were requested to report their labours from year to year, and thus a second set of documents have been produced, entitled "Reports of Researches undertaken at the request of the Association," which are entirely distinct from the "suggestive Reports," but immediately derived from them, and complementary to them.

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