Page:Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.djvu/448

432 In the autumn of 1828 I reached Berlin, and unexpectedly found, from M. Humboldt, that in the course of a few weeks the philosophers of Germany were to hold a meeting in that capital.

I then learnt for the first time that, some years before, Dr. Oken had proposed and organized an annual congress of German naturalists, meeting in each succeeding year in some great town.

I remained to witness the enlarged meeting at Berlin, which was very successful, and wrote an account of it to Sir D. Brewster, who published the description of it in "The Edinburgh Journal of Science." This was, I believe, the first communication to the English public of the existence of the German Society.

A few years after, Sir David Brewster, Sir John Robison, Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Rev. William Vernon Harcourt, undertook the foundation of a similar periodical and itinerant society in our own country.

It appeared to me that the original organization of the British Association, as developed at York and at Oxford, was defective,—that its basis was not sufficiently extended In fact, that other sciences besides the physical were wanting for the harmony and success of the whole. There was no section to interest the landed proprietors or those members of their families who sat in either house of parliament. Nor was there much to attract the manufacturer or the retail dealer. A purely accidental circumstance enabled me to remedy one of these defects.