The British Association dispersed on Wednesday, fixing Birmingham for next
year's meeting, and it is stated that the proceedings have been unusually enjoyable and instructive. The enjoyment may be conceded, as the citizens of Aberdeen were most hospitable, the neighbouring country most beautiful, and the savants slightly disposed, being in Scotland, to indulge in high jinks ; but if the papers were unusually good, the news-
papers have reported them very badly. We never remember to have seen so few calculated to stimulate thought, or create discussion, or interest mankind outside the scientific circles ; and the only one talked about has been Mr. Benjamin Baker's. It is interesting to know that your chance of being smashed on a railway-bridge is about three times what is usually supposed. Most of the papers were more like those published in quarterly " Transactions " than addresses delivered urbi et arbi. It was not that the members were too dignified either, for Sir John Lubbock repeated his account of his experi- ments in teaching dogs to read ; and one gentleman offered a lengthy, learned, and extremely curious history of hopscotch, —a game which, he says, records the leading preoccupations of men from far antiquity. Let us hope that next year the air of the capital of Democracy will stimulate originality, or develop combativeness, or in some way make the proceedings a little less dull to the outside world.
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