The Sun.
London, England, 1858-09-27 00:00:00

THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION.

LEEDS, SEPT. 25.
Yesterday was an, idle day with the members of
the British Association, for though all the sections
assembled as usual, with a good array► of business
to dispose of, most of them discontinued sitting
after one o'clock. Saturday, in the former days of
the Association, was the excursion day, and though
that regulation has been formally broken through
and the excursion day is postponed to the Thursday
following, yet the old members still remember
Saturday as a holiday. A horticultural slioW at
Kirkstall Abbey, and a public distribution of prizes
to the successful candidates at the• Oxford middle-
class examination, also tended •to thin the section
rooms, and the many objects of interest thrown
open for inspection in the town required a leisure
day. The weather, which had previously been very,
unfavourable, cleared up yesterday, and invited
strangers to look about them, so that science did
not advance far in its progress.

There has been a very full attendance of vistors
at the meeting, and the friends of the association
will, no doubt, benefit by the visit to Leeds.
Amongst the names entered on the list, in addition
to those already given, are Professor Airey, Sir
Charles Anderson, the Earl of Bradford, Mr. M. T.
Baines, Sir Charles Barry, Mr. Bazley, Sir Ben-
jamin Brodie, the Rev. J. Barlow, Sir David
Brewster, Lord Alwyn Compton, Mr. E. Chad-
wick, Sir Phillip Egerton, Professor Eckard, le
Marquis de Fontenelle, Capt. Fishbourne, Professor
Faraday, Lord Goderich, Admiral Grace, Lieut.-
Col. Goodenough, Rev. Dr. Hook, Professor Hark-
ness, Mr. J. Heywood, Sir W. Jardine, Sir John
Johnstone, Rev. J. Kemick, Mr. Monckton Milnes,
Mr. J. S. Russell, Col. Rawlinson, the Dean of
Ripon, Professor Rogers, Count de Strzelecki, the
Marquis of Stafford, Mr. Robert Stephenson, Mr.
James Yates, &c. The sum received up to Friday
night Was £1,714.
l'rofessor PHILLIPS on Friday evening delivered
a lecture in the Town Hall on the ironstones of
Cleveland, in Yorkshire, and showed the great
development which the working of V iron has
undergone in that district since 1848, when it was
first undertaken. The want of coal in the imme-
diate neighbourhood delayed the progress for some
time, but the supplies since received by railway
from the Durham and Yorkshire coal fields have
removed that obstruction to the development of the
works, and nearly two million tons of iron stone
are now annually quarried and smelted there.
The bands of iron stone vary in thickness from 8
to 32 feet, and the quantity of metal amounts in
some to 50 per cent. Three bands of ironstone
extends over an area of 200 square miles.
The opening address of Sir John Herschel, in the
Chemical Section, was unfortunately inaudible to
most of the company, owing to the low tone &
voice in which he speaks, and he has consequently
been induced to print it. Copies were issued yes-
terday, and the greater portion of it is subjoined.
'lt is to be hoped that his remarks on the growing
confusion arising from the multiplication of terms
in organic chemistry not correctly applied will have
good effect. After some introductory remarks he
observed :

Since organic chemistry has assumed, by the
experiments and reasonings of Dumas, Liebig,
Hoffmann, and its other distinguished cultivators,
that highly abstract and intellectual form under
which it now presents itself, and which by the
links of the platina bases, and compounds such as
those described by Gibbs and Genth under the
name of the ammonio-eobaltic bases, and by those
which are every day coming into view by the
mutual interweaving, if I may use such an
expression, of the organic and inorganic systems of
composition in bases such as those of the metallic
ethyls and those of boron and silicon, it seems to
place these conceptions in much the same sort of
relation to the ordinary atomic theory as put iorth
by Dalton and Higgins, and the elementary notions
of oxide, acid, and base of Lavoisier, that the tran-
scendental analysis holds to common algebra. And
here perhaps I may be tolerated if I put in a word
of reclamation against the system of notation
into which chemists, who for the most part are not
algebraists, have fallen, in expressing their atomic
formulre. These formulae have been gradually
taking on a character more and more repulsive
to the algebraical eye. There is a principle
which I think ought to be borne in mind in framing
the conventional notations as well as nomenclatures
of every science, at every new step in its progress,
viz.—that as sciences do not stand alone, but exsist
in mutual relation to each other—as it is for their
common interest that there should exist among
them free communication on their frontier points
—the language they use and the signs they employ
should be framed in such a way as at least not to
contradict each other. As the atomic formulw
wed by the chemist are not merely symbolic of the
mode in which atoms are grouped, but are intended
also to express numerical relations, indicative of the
aggregate weights of the several atoms in each
group and the several groups in each compound, it
is distressing to the algebraist to find that he can-
not interpret a chemical formula (I mean in its nu-
merical application) according to the received rules
of arithmetical computation. In a paper which I
published a long time ago on the hyposulphites, I
was particularly careful to use a mode of notation
which, while perfectly clear in its chemical sense,
and fully expressing the relations of the groupings
I allude to, accommonated itself at the same time
perfectly well to numerical computation, no symbol
being in any case juxtaposed, or in any way inter-
combinedwith one another, so as to violate the strict
algebraical meaning of the formula. This system
seemed for a while likely to be generally adopted,
but it has been more and more departed from, and
I think with a manifest corresponding departure
from intelligibility. The time is perhaps not very
far distant when from a knowledge of the family to
which a chemical element belongs, and its order in
that family, we may be able to predict with confi-
dence the system of groups into which it is capable
of entering, and the part it will play in the combi-
nation. A great step in this direction seems to me
to have been lately made by Professor Cook, of the
Haavard University, of the United States (in a me-
moir which forms part of the sth volume of the
Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences), to extend and carry out the classification
of chemical elements into families of the kind
I allude to, in a system of grouping, in
which the first idea, or rather the first germ
of the idea, may he traced to a remark made by M.
Dumas, in one of his reports to this association, and
which is founded on the principle of arranging them
in a series, in each of which the atomic weight of
the elements it comprises are found among-the terms
of an arithmetical progression, the common differ-
ence of which in the several series are 3,4, 5,6, 8,
and 9 times the atomic weight of hydrogen respec-
tively: So arranged they form six groups, which
are fairly entitled to be considered natural families,
each group having common properties in the highest
degree characteristic ; and what is more remarkable,
the initial member in each group possessing in every
case the characteristic property of the group in its
most eminent degree, while the others exhibit that
property in a less and less degree, according to their
rank in the progression, or according to the in-
creased numerical value of the atomic equivalent.
Generally speaking, I am a little slow to give full