The British Association at Leeds

Abstract

IN the phraseology of our trans tlantic cousins, the Handbook for the leous meeting may have ‘said a mountful when it describes the area visited this year by the British Association as a ‘conurbation,’ but behind the word a very important feature of this year's meeting is struggling, if clumsily, for recognition. Proximity of population, and the interlacing of road and rail communication, make the area of the West Riding of Yorkshire one urban unit with a population between one and a quarter and one and a half millions. At the same time, local civic spirit proclaims its divisibility into independent units every whit as strenuously as the physicist splits up the chemist's atom. The uninitated visitor must not confound Dewsbury with Batley, or (as the provisional issue of the time-table did !) Halifax with Huddersfield; his crime is as great as that of the visitor to the Western States who assumes that Los Angeles and San Francisco arc much the same thing.