The Sun.
London, England, 1846-09-12 00:00:00

BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE

ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE.
SOUTHAMPTON, FRIDAY.—The first general meeting
of the association was held last night, mud the expecta-
tion of Prince Albert's presence collected a very fa
audience in the Victoria Rooms. The room selected for
the meeting will hold 600 or '7OO pers.-Jr-is, and wa,
crowded to excess; a number of ladirs formed part o
the company. The apartment i.; a hands mile one, and
the reason of its being below stairs is, that the house is
built upon the side of a hill; if there weie an approach
at the back from the lower ground, the peculiarity woule.
disappear; but, as it is, it is a house with the door at

the top. Through the courtesy of Mr. Blitz, the pro
prietor, and master of the ceremonies for this occasion.
ample accommodation was provided for the representa-
tives of the press. At half-past eight o'clock his Royai
Highness arrived; he looked extremely well; he was in
plain evening dress, wearing a black cost and trousers.
and white waistcoot and neckerchief. He took his seat
on the platform on the right of the chair. Next to th,
Prince were Lieutenant-Colons! Sabine (the General
Secretary); Viscount Palmerston, M.P.; the Marquis of
Northampton, the Bishop of Norwich, the Speaker of
the House of Commons, and the Mayor of Southampton.
It was said that the Bishop of Oxford was too unwell to
attend. The Marquis of Winchester, the Dean of West-
minster, Mr. Tite, and a whole host of scientific persons
were present.

The company rose to receive the Prince. His Royal
Highness having taken his seat, they sat down ; and
the chair was taken by
Sir J. F. W. HERSCHEL, Bart., the retiring President,
who congratulated the meeting on a presence which
gave a dignity and sanction to its proceedings such a:
on no former occasion the society had received.—
(Cheers.) For the honour thus conferred they felt the
warmest emotions of grateful respect • it was a recogni
tion of the glorious cause in which they were embarked
—a cause in which were involved the glory of England,
and the prosperity of every itrhabitant of this country,
from the Queen upon her throne, God bless her—
(Cheers)—down to the lowest inhabitant of a cottage.
For himself, in returning on this occasion to a town as-
sociated with the reminiscences of his younger days, he
could not but see, as in every town in England, a great
change, a start forward into civic and commercial ac-
tivity, which would make it, as of old, a link of commu-
nication between England and her distant colonies—one
of the poles of that electric circuit with which Great
Britain must animate and might convulse the world.
The itinerant character of the association brought it tht
more in contact with that great phenomenon--the im-,
mensity of our national progress, the intense activity
pervading everything in England at this moment, with
the fact that it was every year more and more placed
under the guidance of that science which it was tilt
society's office to promote and to diffuse. Believing
firmly that the resources of science were inexhaust-
ible, and that its scope extended to ameliora-
tions of every description, he could look forward ti
the future, not only without gloom and foreboding, but
with the temperate exultation which Providence per
mitted to such as desired no aggrandisement but that
which was in unison with its own grand and beneficent
designs. With regard to his own year of presidency, he
would just remind the audience that that year had given
them the discovery of a new planet, and the prospect o'
another; they saw it as Colurubus saw America, from
the shores of Sp.dn. In the subdivision of a member of
our system, we had also beheld one of the recognised
ingredients of that system separated into two, each pur
suing an independent orbit round the sun. After passing
a high eulogium upon the new *President, Sir John then
resigned the chair to
Sir R. J. MURCHISON, who immediately afterward:
rose and said,—Gentlemen of the British Association,
deeply conscious as I am of my inferiority to my emi
nent predecessor in the chair of the British Association
in all that respects the higher branches of physical
science, I st 11 hope that my ardent devotion to your
cause from your very cradle, from your very institution,
may plead in my favour, and may be held by you as
some guarantee for the zealous execution of my office.
Give me leave to assure you that I consider being
placed in this position as a mark of approbation on your
part, which is to me the highest honour that could have
been cantered upon me through life,—an honour the
more cherished because it has been confered upon me
in a county with which I have long been connected by
family ties, arid in which I mado my first essay as a geo-
logist. —(Cheers.) Those feelings are strongly enhanced
when I look around, and see that this association has
for the first time been honoured with the presence of
royalty.—(Loud cheers.) You cannot co iceive the gra-
tification it gives me, when I know that his Royal High-
ness, the consort of our beloved Sovereign—(Cheers)—
comes fresh from the mines of Cornwall, and has been
making himself so good a geologist, that, in addition
to all those other numerous branches of science with
which his Royal Highness is already acquainted, we
shall see him here attending our sections in a few Jays ;
for we know him to be—wh,at I now inform his -Royal
Highness of—the one and only honorary member of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science,-
-(Loud cheers, during which his Royal Highness
bowed his acknowledgments to the President.) But,
when gentlemen trust to memory they are very discur-
sive, and on these occasions it is necessary to keep pie-
cisely to the point, and therefore I must now trouble
you with my sermon—(A laugh) —I must put on my
spectacles—(Laughter)—and read to you a discourse.
which I have prepared with as much care as is in my
power.
The PRESIDENT then proceeded to read his inaugural
address. After observing that the origin, progress, and
many of the objects of this their " Parliamcnt of
Science" had been sufficiently explained on former
occasions, he proceeded to dwell on the recent progress
and present state of various branches of science. The
discourse was of great length, and will hardly admit of
abridgment; one or two of the most interesting portions
of it will convey an idea: of its nature. Sir Roderick
said, " A request from the association to Professor
Bunsen, of Marburg, and our countryman, Dr. Lyon
Playfair, coupled with a contribution of small amount
towards the expenses involved in the undertaking, has
produced:a report on the conditions and products of iror.
furnaces, which is of the greatest value is a commercial
view to one of the most important of our manufactures,
and possesses, at the same time, a very high interest to
chymical science in some of the views which it developes
On the one hand, it exhibits an entirely new theory of
the reduction, by cyanngen gas as the chief agent, of
iron from the ore; en the other, it shows that, in ad
am-
moniac may daily be collected at the single establish-
mentditin t
ofn Aa lvtst
firetosnai
,vwngheroef the experiments about 2cwt. of sal am-
experiments were made;
thus leading us to infer that in the iron furnaces
of Britain there may be obtained from vapour
which now passes away an enormous quantity
of this valuable substance, which would materially
lessen the dependence of our agriculturists on foreign
is,u r indeed,naceof
that in pursuing this inquiry into the gaseous contents
ogfuaanobiasing f
greatrnost gratifying to observe,
height, our associates
traced out, foot by foot, the most recondite chymical
processes, and described the fiery products with the
same accuracy as if their researches had been made on
the table of a laboratory." * * * * *
" When our associate Qonybeare reported to us, at our
second meeting, on the actual state and ulterior prospects
of what he well termed the archmology of the globe,'
he dwelt with justice on the numerous researches in
different countries which had clearly established the his-
tory of a descent, as it were, into the bowels of the earth
—which led us, in a word, downwards through those
newer deposits that connect high antiquity with our
own period, into those strata which support our great
British coal-field. Beyond this, however, the perspec-
tive was dark and doubtful.

" Res alts, terra et caligine mersas.'
Now, however, we have dispersed this gloom, and by
researches first carried out to a distinct classification in
the British Isles, and thence extended to Russia and
America, geologists have shown that the records of suc-
cession, as indicated by the entombment of fossil ani
mals, are as well developed in these very ancient or
palteozoic strata as in any of the overlying or more
recently formed deposits. After toiling many years
in this department of the science, in conjunction
with Sedgwick, Lonsdale, De Verneuil, Keyserliug,
and others of my fellow-labourers, I have arrived
at the conclusion that we have reached the very
genesis of animal Ife upon the globe, and
that no further vestigia ntrorsune will be found
beneath that protozoic or lower Silurian group
in the great inferior mass of which no vertebrated ani-
mal has yet been detected amid the countless profusion
of the lower order of marine animals entombed in it.
But, however this may be, it is certain that, in the last
few years, all Central and Eastern Europe, and even
parts of Siberia, have been brought into accordance with
British strata, whilst our kinsmen of the Far West
have so ably developed the structure of their respective
states, that our countryman, Lyell, has informed us
that the excellent map. which accompanies his work
upon North America is simply the grt.uping together of
data prepared by native state geologists, s hich he has
tihfe lately, Ea rof Rosse, he has as-
signed a fixity and order to bodies which were reviousl
i through the great
paralleled with our well-known British types. If, then,
the astronomer has, to a vast extent, expounded the me-
chanism theour
associate
viewed as mere nebulae floating in space, and has alsoy
inferred that the surface cavities in our nearest neigh-
telescope o
off
neigh-
bour of the planetary system are analogous to the vol-
canic apertures and depressions of the earth; the geolo-
gist, contributing data of another order to the great
storehouse of natural knowledge, has determined by ab-
solute and tangible proofs, the precise manner in which
OUT planet has been successively enveloped in divers
cerements, each teeming with peculiar forms of distinct
life, and. has marked the revolutions which have inter-
fered with these successive creations, from the earliest
dawn of living things to the limit of the historic. era.
In short, the fundamental steps gained in geology
since the early days of the British Association are so re-
markable and so numerous that the time has now come
for a second report upon the progress of this science,
which may, I trust, be pr,epared for an approaching, if
not for the next meeting.' * * *
" When M. Quetelet remarks, that the phases of the
smallest insect are bound up with the phases of the plant
that nourishes it ; that plant itself being in its gradual
development the product, in some sort, of all anterior
modifications of the soil and atmosphere,' he 'compels
the admission that the study which should embrace all