10 SEPTEMBER 1853, Page 1

NEWS OF THE WEEK.

THE meeting of the British Association at Hull recalls our wearied attention from exhausted political subjects to higher and more enduring laws. Now that the Association has per- mitted its extraneous and less real excitements to subside, and has quietly settled down into an annual convocation or parliament of scientific representatives, its practical utility is better appreciated. It may not rouse "the country" as it once did ; the ferment which it creates may not extend beyond the classes of sevens and dilettanti who attend it in the place of its ses- sion; but it is not the less usefully developing the spontaneous growth of a central administration for the study and practical ap- plication of science.

This is a much-needed department of state, towards which, as yet, our most hopeful advance is marked by the Association. For it is really doing more, useful as that is, than to collect the reports in the several "sections" for the past year : it is making progress towards bringing the observation and application of science to a greater unity. Among the facts announced this year, perhaps the most important is the progress made in the arrangements to incor- porate the " transactions " of the several learned and scientifio societies in one, with continuity of review and of record. That would bring all the data for study and all the available science for practice to a focus.

It is a yet more important result, that by the advance of freely- dismissed science amongst us, the public mind of England is be- coming gradually disciplined to a better conduct of great duties. Thus, for example, the trial of reaping-machines at Stirling, fol- lowing close upon similar trials at Mr. Philip Pusey's and Mr. Mechi's, is but one instance of many which prove that the agri- cultural mind is in training to a scientific conduct of its functions. The recent and successful administration of an official grant by the Royal Agricultural Society of Scotland, in collecting agricul- tural statistics for three counties, is another fragmentary mark of "progress" leading to a full acquisition of similar information for the United Kingdom. The establishment of a telescope to observe astronomical phenomena and solve nebnlie in the Southern hemi- sphere, the effort to establish a midland observatory at Notting- ham, and the union of England and America in a systematic ob- servation of winds and currents at sea, are scattered evidences of this general activity, this universal tendency to centralize science in order to render it generally available. In a much humbler matter, the announcement of the Metropolitan Commissioners of Sewers, this week, that although they have neither powers nor means to construct a uniform system of metropolitan drainage, they are carrying out their partial works with a view to ultimately falling in with a whole design, belongs to the same class of evi- dence, by marking how, in every department, the English mind is becoming elevated and subdued to a scientific discipline in the practical business of life. We have indeed still much anarchy amongst us, still much bar- barous neglect or clumsiness. Although we have arrived at a point at which we can contemplate a regular system of drainage, we have not reached such a point as to construct one. We could plan rail- ways years ago ; but we have executed them imperfectly-, and we administer them vilely. Only this week, a frightful accident hap- pens through a paltry but repeated neglect : certain " points "get clogged with dirt, will not work, and a train that ought to have dashed on to Scotland dashes into a " siding " and carriages therein stationed. Those carriages, for whom the ill-working points had been diverted, had been moved in just after the Queen passed on her way to Scotland : if they had been moved in before, the acci- dent that ensued would have involved the Sovereign ; and our in- ; discipline would have been illustrated by a disaster showing how

we permit the Majesty of England to be at the mercy of a negli- gent pointsman or dirt-clogged switches!