The British Association for the Advancement of Science : the Provincial Background

Abstract

When the 'cultivators of science', as they had originally been called,' dispersed from York in the early autumn of I83I, it was with the understanding that the British Association for the Advancement of Science which they had established was to be an itinerant body, having no fixed abode, but assembling annually in one of the larger towns or cities of the kingdom. London, however, was not to be included in their circuit. As John Dalton had insisted, they were 'ever to be Provincials'.2 The provincial character of the British Association was stamped indelibly on the inaugural meeting at York. The Yorkshire Philosophical Society accommodated the gathering in its new home, the Yorkshire Museum; its president, Lord Milton, its vice-president, the Rev William Vernon Harcourt, and its secretaries, John Phillips and William Gray, jun., were appointed respectively the first president, vice-president and secretaries of the Association and Vernon Harcourt and Phillips duly edited the report of the meeting.3 The north of England, especially those towns with active scientific institutions of their own-Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield-provided most of the visitors. The formation of an organization to rescue science and its practitioners from supposed neglect had first been suggested by David Brewster, the Scottish natural philosopher, in October I830, in the course of a review of Charles Babbage's book Reflections on the Decline of Science in England;5 five or six months later Brewster, after some preliminary negotiations with