1 SEPTEMBER 1866, Page 3

The British Association broke up on Thursday with an enter-

tainment given by the Mayor of Nottingham, at which the mem-

bers for that borough, Mr. Bernal Osborne and Lord Amberley, were present. At this entertainment the Association was no longer in full scientific dress, but in a sort of undress of human jocularity, which occasionally became rather feeble and watery. Mr. Bernal Osborne especially, who is always expected to joke, and can now and then joke very tolerably, exacted too many jokes from himself at one time for his _genius, and got into the feeblest description of punning before he sat down. He described himself as unscientific, as having come into Parliament, as Gibbon said of himself, "with an amount of erudition which might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which any schoolboy might have been ashamed." Lord Byron had described hint and his class— "He saw with his own eyes the moon was round, Was also certain that the earth was square, amens° he'd travelled fifty miles and found No sign of turning anywhere."

In returning thanks for the House of Commons, he returned thanks, he said, " for a great body of ignoramuses." Mr. Osborne then joked M. de Chaillu about the difficulty he would find in taking alive a good specimen of the Nottingham " Lamb," in whom " the friskiness of the lamb is combined with the ferocity of the lion." Excited by the plaudits that greeted these brilliant jokes, Mr. Osborne went very low indeed ; he said he would back the Mayor of Nottingham against any other mayor—[the reporters here very kindly interpolate " mare " in brackets as a. gloss, just as Artemua Ward pats in " This is a goak 1—in the United Kingdom. The Association laughed again loudly. A very little matter of humour goes a great way with these deep scientific people. They are generally as good-natured as they are wise, and then their daily diet contains so little humour that even a teaspoonful is a heavy dose.